Connie and Elly's objectivity...

As we know, the Pattersons never told Georgia anything about Connie Poirier until she asked Elly "Who is that mannish-looking, flat-chested woman with the bad dye job talking to Phil?" While this didn't lead to the ugly scene that the leering gargoyle Elly calls a husband wanted, our heroine's studied refusal to whine about how her selfish younger brother left poor Connie at the mercies of an awful man like Ted seems to fly in the face of her being what she calls an objective observer. You'd think that if she defined being objective as hammering people over the head with a laundry list of a sitting-duck antagonist's character flaws while ignoring any good traits, Phil's refusal to become an instant father so that Elly might crow about his misery as a means of getting pay-back for having a better childhood would be somewhere at the top of the list. The matter resolves itself when you realize that Elly also wanted an ugly scene so she could hector Phil about how his bad behaviour finally caught up with him. The really annoying part is that the same woman who was willing to throw Phil under the bus so she could finally avenge herself for being treated less leniently despite having seniority merely because he was a boy has no idea why there's a distance between them now.