The Well of Pen-Morfa is set in a small Welsh town, and this setting both opens and closes the door to sympathy based on the characters' personalities. Let's look at this in more detail.

Pen-Morfa is a typical small town where everyone knows everyone else's business and where gossip runs wild and people form opinions quickly and change them very slowly. This means that people feel sympathy or not largely based on their presuppositions about their neighbors. We can see this in the first story the narrator relates about the beautiful young woman who went away to be a servant and came back pregnant. Her child is crippled, but the neighbors show little sympathy because of the mother's actions. Their presuppositions and small-town prejudices have taken over.

The primary story of Nest Gwynn shows a mix of sympathy and apathy. Nest is injured in a fall on the ice and becomes crippled. She is already engaged when this happens, and her fiancé, Edward, feels sorry for Nest but decides he can no longer marry her. He is a farmer, and he needs a strong woman to be his wife. His sympathy does not extend far enough to accept Nest when she cannot be of use to him. He decides he must be practical first.

Nest's mother cares for her tenderly, but Nest is bitter until, just after her mother dies, a preacher tells her that to find love, Nest must choose to love. This changes Nest's view of the world. She looks around her little village, knowing, just like everyone else, who is in need of her sympathy. Nest, however, unlike others, is willing to extend that sympathy actively, and she takes in Mary Williams, who is said to be crazy. Mary is abused by her family, but Nest treats her with great kindness, and the two are happy together for the rest of Nest's life. Nest has found sympathy in Mary as well.