thinking of his prototype when she criticizes the character of St. John
Rivers. "A missionary either goes into his office for a piece of bread,
or he goes for enthusiasm, and that is both too good and too bad a
quality for St. John. It's a bit of your absurd charity to believe in
such a man." As an intellectual woman Mary Taylor realized Charlotte
Brontë's intellect, but it is doubtful if she ever fully realized what,
beyond an intellect, she had got hold of in her friend. She was a woman
of larger brain than Ellen Nussey, she was loyal and warm-hearted to the
last degree, but it was not given to her to see in Charlotte Brontë what
Ellen Nussey, little as you would have expected it, had seen. She did
not keep her letters. She burnt them "in a fit of caution", which may
have been just as well.

But Mary Taylor is important. She had, among her more tender qualities,
an appalling frankness. It was she who told poor little Charlotte that
she was very ugly. Charlotte never forgot it. You can feel in her
letters, in her novels, in her whole nature, the long reverberation of
the shock. She said afterwards: "You did me a great deal of good,
Polly," by which she meant that Polly had done her an infinity of harm.

Her friends all began by trying to do her good. Even Ellen Nussey tried.
Charlotte is very kindly cautioned against being "tempted by the
fondness of my sisters to consider myself of too much importance", and
in a parenthesis Ellen Nussey begs her not to be offended. "Oh, Ellen,"
Charlotte writes, "do you think I could be offended by any good advice
you may give me?" She thanks her heartily, and loves her "if possible
all the better for it". Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tell
her of her faults and "cease flattering her". Charlotte very sensibly
refuses; and it is not till she has got away from her sisters that her
own heart-searchings begin. They are mainly tiresome, but there is a