In Mrs Gould's biography, Conrad takes pains to create the perfect altruist: an orphan whose desperation for love makes her a benefactress, raised to admire poverty as a "sacrifice to a noble ideal." Mrs Gould is an almost entirely sympathetic character in Nostromo, but even the narrator admits that she lacks a "legitimate touch of materialism"; i.e., that her idealism is too impractical.

The phrase "an orphan from early childhood" might have an allegorical meaning too, relating to the history of altruism. Organized altruism beginning with Christianty, its parent, so to speak, is the Roman Empire, which of course fell during Christianity's "early childhood."

Speaking even more abstractly, altruism is by definition a political orphan, since its demand to expend wealth on alleviating human exploitation is, when taken to its logical extreme, opposed to the nature of politics as such. Thus it can find full, unconditional acceptance in no political family.