She knew that Bill Patch was preoccupied, as well he might be, with his own affairs, and that it was on her account that he had produced those intrinsically feeble, and entirely unsuccessful, jests and flippancies. And although Bill failed conspicuously in his object, Nancy’s gratitude went out to him.
It was, no doubt, an unpleasant evening. Bill did not go out, as he usually did, and Mrs. Fazackerly could only presume that the Harter ménage was being left to the further discussion of their infelicitous relations.
Her father and Christopher Ambrey continued to try and talk one another down, having long since forgotten the original point at issue, and at eleven o’clock Mrs. Fazackerly, in despair, went to bed.
All this I heard from Nancy, and she certainly made me visualize it clearly enough—the conversation with Bill Patch on the circular bench under the pink may tree, and the pity and affection that he inspired in her so strongly, despite the fact that, in her gentle judgment, he was altogether wrong.
She saw him, theoretically, as a person who was undecided between right and wrong, but when he was actually there, talking to her, I believe that Nancy felt vaguely that his perplexity was not exactly of that sort. It was at once more subtle and less acute. She did not believe that he was either selfish, or sensual, or irreligious.
“Even if he ran away with Mrs. Harter, I shouldn’t think him any of those things,” Mrs. Fazackerly told herself, but it rather amazed her to realize that, all the same.
For all her superficial glibness in the art of fibbing, Nancy Fazackerly, as I have said before, is fundamentally sincere, and her view of Bill Patch has always interested me.
Almost everybody else saw him as the victim of an unscrupulous woman.
That was the view held by Mrs. Leeds, who knew nothing whatever about it; by Leeds, who may well have been biased owing to his non-success with Mrs. Harter at the picnic; and by the Kendals.