imagine with a laugh that there might possibly be a dozen
little Joe Taylors before all was over."

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-