This is atrocious.  But the malice and bad taste of it are nothing to the gross carelessness and ignorance it reveals—­ignorance of facts and identities and names.  Charlotte’s suitor was Mr. James Taylor and not Joe.  Joe, the brother of her friend, Mary Taylor, was married already to a lady called Amelia, and it is of Joe and his Amelia that Charlotte writes.  “She must take heart” (Amelia had been singularly unsuccessful), “there may yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after—­run after—­to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go.”

Of Mr. James Taylor she writes more decorously.  Miss Nussey, as usual, had been thinking unwarrantable things, and had made a most unbecoming joke about Jupiter and Venus, which outraged Charlotte’s “common sense”.  “The idea of the little man,” says Charlotte, “shocks me less.  He still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came a letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment and knowledge, fit to have been the product of a giant.  You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you please, but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, my diminutive and red-haired friend, which adds a foot to his stature, turns his sandy locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal in my estimation.”  This is all she says by way of appreciation.  She says later, “His manners and his personal appearance scarcely pleased me more than at the first interview....  I feel that in his way he has a regard for me; a regard which I cannot bring myself entirely to reciprocate in kind, and yet its withdrawal leaves a painful blank.”  Miss Nussey evidently insists that Charlotte’s feelings are engaged this time, arguing possibly from the “painful blank”; and Charlotte becomes explicit.  She speaks of the disadvantages of the alleged match, and we gather that Miss Nussey has been urging her to take the little man.  “But there is another thing which forms a barrier more difficult to pass than any of these.  Would Mr. Taylor and I ever suit?  Could I ever feel for him enough love to accept him as a husband?  Friendship—­gratitude—­esteem I have, but each moment he came near me, and that I could see his eyes fastened on me, my veins ran ice.  Now that he is away, I feel far more gently to him; it is only close by that I grow rigid—­stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger—­which nothing softens but his retreat, and a perfect subduing of his manner.”  And again, “my conscience, I can truly say, does not now accuse me of having treated Mr. Taylor with injustice or unkindness ... but with every disposition and with every wish, with every intention even to look on him in the most favourable point of view at his last visit, it was impossible to me in my inward heart to think of him as one that might one day be acceptable as a husband.”  Could anything be more explicit?  There is a good deal more of it.  After one very searching criticism of Mr. Taylor:  “One does not like