The narrator of "The Love of a Good woman" says of Enid that "[s]he had never thought of nursing as just something to do until she got married. Her...

As my colleague rightly asserts, the extent of Enid's goodness is debatable. It would appear that Enid is "good" if the criteria for goodness is the personal inclination to adhere to the social conventions of one's environment. In the story, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Enid, by all accounts, is such a woman.

She promises her father, on his deathbed, that she will not work at a hospital. In her father's eyes,...

As my colleague rightly asserts, the extent of Enid's goodness is debatable. It would appear that Enid is "good" if the criteria for goodness is the personal inclination to adhere to the social conventions of one's environment. In the story, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Enid, by all accounts, is such a woman.

She promises her father, on his deathbed, that she will not work at a hospital. In her father's eyes, nursing makes a "woman coarse." Enid's mother later explains what her father likely meant by this. Accordingly, nursing allows a young woman to become more familiar with male patients than is considered socially acceptable. The exposure to nude or almost nude male bodies is considered anathema to a girl's chances of marrying respectably. Always independent in other matters, Enid surprises and irritates her mother by complying with her father's dying wish. One might say that the "deathbed promise, the self-denial, the wholesale sacrifice" makes Enid a "good" woman—but does it?

Or is Enid's pliant capitulation to her father's will an attempt at self-flagellation for other less feminine inclinations? For example, during the last stages of Mrs. Quinn's illness, Enid has vivid dreams about copulating with any number of "utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners. With fat squirmy babies or patients in bandages or her own mother." It is also worth noting that when Enid gave up her dream of being a registered nurse, she also gave up "the possibility of a decent job in a hospital in order to do miserable backbreaking work in miserable primitive houses for next to no money." So, the question begs to be asked: is Enid's outward compliance with accepted conventions a method of self-preservation or perhaps an effort at placating her inner demons?

Enid's eventual epiphany, that her mother had been complicit in hiding her father's adultery, is devastating to her. Her own mother had preserved the status quo and had lied to her about what Enid saw when she was four or five years old. Later, Enid contemplates the virtue of "silence" in the face of aberration or discrepancy:

Through her silence, her collaboration in a silence, what benefits could bloom. For others, and for herself. This was what most people knew. A simple thing that it had taken her so long to understand. This was how to keep the world habitable.

Basically, Enid comes to understand that the facade of "goodness" makes the world "habitable." In her case, this facade of "goodness" that she exhibits to the world may yet earn her the man she fancies, Rupert. However, the cost to her conscience may be considerable (as she contemplates a possible sexual union with a murderer). It does indeed betray her earlier teaching to Mrs. Quinn's children that people need to be held accountable "because of how bad they are going to feel in themselves. Even if nobody did see them and nobody ever knew. If you do something very bad and you are not punished you feel worse, you feel far worse than if you are."

So, Enid is a "good" woman to the extent that she observes the conventions of her environment. Beyond that, the idea of her goodness becomes a matter of great debate.