CHAPTER XVI

The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable.—­It was a wretched business indeed!—­Such an overthrow of every thing she had been wishing for!—­Such a development of every thing most unwelcome!—­Such a blow for Harriet!—­that was the worst of all.  Every part of it brought pain and humiliation, of some sort or other; but, compared with the evil to Harriet, all was light; and she would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken—­ more in error—­more disgraced by mis-judgment, than she actually was, could the effects of her blunders have been confined to herself.

“If I had not persuaded Harriet into liking the man, I could have borne any thing.  He might have doubled his presumption to me—­ but poor Harriet!”

How she could have been so deceived!—­He protested that he had never thought seriously of Harriet—­never!  She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion.  She had taken up the idea, she supposed, and made every thing bend to it.  His manners, however, must have been unmarked, wavering, dubious, or she could not have been so misled.

The picture!—­How eager he had been about the picture!—­ and the charade!—­and an hundred other circumstances;—­ how clearly they had seemed to point at Harriet.  To be sure, the charade, with its “ready wit”—­but then the “soft eyes”—­ in fact it suited neither; it was a jumble without taste or truth.  Who could have seen through such thick-headed nonsense?

Certainly she had often, especially of late, thought his manners to herself unnecessarily gallant; but it had passed as his way, as a mere error of judgment, of knowledge, of taste, as one proof among others that he had not always lived in the best society, that with all the gentleness of his address, true elegance was sometimes wanting; but, till this very day, she had never, for an instant, suspected it to mean any thing but grateful respect to her as Harriet’s friend.

To Mr. John Knightley was she indebted for her first idea on the subject, for the first start of its possibility.  There was no denying that those brothers had penetration.  She remembered what Mr. Knightley had once said to her about Mr. Elton, the caution he had given, the conviction he had professed that Mr. Elton would never marry indiscreetly; and blushed to think how much truer a knowledge of his character had been there shewn than any she had reached herself.  It was dreadfully mortifying; but Mr. Elton was proving himself, in many respects, the very reverse of what she had meant and believed him; proud, assuming, conceited; very full of his own claims, and little concerned about the feelings of others.