Emma, chapters 7-9

Mr. Elton has now gone off to London to have Emma’s portrait of Harriet Smith suitably framed—though you get the impression, by the interminable hosannas he keeps heaping on the picture, that for him the only suitable frame would be made of unicorn’s horn dusted with flecks of dandruff from the head of the god Apollo. As irritating as all his fawning and fluttering may be (and it’s very, very irritating), Emma wallows in it, because in her eyes it’s proof that he’s crushing just super hard on Harriet. What other possible explanation can there be? Especially when you’re Emma Woodhouse, and you’ve arranged your whole life so that your first idea about anything is bound to be a hundred-percent slam-dunk?
But then—alas, a complication. Harriet, far waiting for Mr. Elton to return from London to bestow on Emma the framed portrait (and take as payment for his efforts the hand of its subject), comes boomeranging back to Highbury about twenty minutes after having left it, explaining at length (and we’re talking about Harriet here, so “at length” means basically a week and a half) that she’d no sooner got back to Mrs. Goddard’s than she found a letter awaiting her there, from Mr. Robert Martin, proposing that he yoke himself to her and spend the rest of their lives plowing the same furrow. Harriet is predictably surprised and flattered and abashed and uncertain and agog and exhilarated, and that’s just her first six syllables. After she’s finished bashing her way through the gamut of maidenly reactions she turns to Emma and asks “what she should do,” as though needing Emma to issue a direct command, along the lines of “Sit,” “Stay,” or “Heel.”
Emma, however, is so taken aback by Robert Martin’s affrontery (“Upon my word…the young man is determined not to lose any thing for want of asking. He will connect himself well if he can”), doesn’t answer right away, so Harriet urges her to read the letter herself, to help frame her mind. Emma, we’re told, “was not sorry to be pressed”, presumably because it saves her having to snatch the thing out of Harriet’s fingers. And what do you know, she actually finds it to be a well-written piece of work, one that wouldn’t shame a gentleman. “There were not merely no grammatical errors…It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling.” So Emma’s left with all her scorn rolling around on her tongue, and no place to put it.
At least, not for long; for she quickly decides that “one of his sisters must have helped him,” and tells Harriet so. But, no—on second (or third?) thought, she admits that “it is not the style of a woman…it is too strong and concise; not diffuse enough for a woman. No doubt he is a sensible man…Vigorous, decided, with sentiments to a certain point, but not coarse. A better written letter, Harriet (returning it to her) than I had expected.”
Harriet is practically jogging in place in anticipation. “Well…well—and—and what shall I do?” Emma—and we can picture her here, being maddeningly matter-of-fact, with a butter-wouldn’t-melt look on her face—says, what, with regard to the letter? “Yes,” says Harriet, climbing the nearest tree and swinging from an overhanging branch. Well of course, Emma says, you must answer it. “But what shall I say?” Harriet begs, now on all fours and gnawing at Emma’s ankle. “Dear Miss Woodhouse, do advise me.”
But Emma’s not having that. “Oh, no, no,” she insists, “the letter had much better be all your own. You will express yourself very properly, I am sure…”
“…There is no danger of your not being intelligible, which is the first thing. Your meaning must be unequivocal: no doubts or demurs; and such expressions of gratitude and concern for the pain you are inflicting as propriety requires, will present themselves unbidden to your mind, I am persuaded. You need not be prompted to write with the appearance of sorrow for his disappointment.”
Harriet, who obviously needs a few sharp thwacks to the forehead to help even the most obvious idea penetrate her skull, says, “You think I ought to refuse him, then?” and Emma is shocked, shockedthat Harriet would ever have thought otherwise. When Harriet had sought her advice, she’d naturally assumed she was asking, not for help in deciding whether to accept, but on how best to phrase a refusal. When Harriet goes all slack-jawed on hearing this, Emma scowls and says, “You mean to return a favorable answer, I collect.”
“No, I do not; that is I do not mean—What shall I do? What would you advise me to do? Pray, dear Miss Woodhouse, tell me what I ought to do?”
“I shall not give you any advice, Harriet. I will have nothing to do with it. This is a point which you must settle with your own feeling…If you prefer Mr. Martin to every other person; if you think him the most agreeable man you have ever been in company with, why should you hesitate? You blush, Harriet. Does any body else occur to you at this moment under such a definition? Harriet, Harriet, do not deceive yourself; do not be run away with by gratitude and compassion. At this moment whom are you thinking of?”
She basically does everything but hold up a flashcard reading ELTON.
Harriet, in these scenes, is basically a lab rat whose behavior Emma is guiding by the strategic application of small electric shocks. This explains the twitching, nervous-tic demeanor she now adopts, as she says, yes, of course, you’re right, “I must do as well as I can by myself; and I have now quite determined, and really almost made up my mind, to refuse Mr. Martin. Do you think I am right?”
Now that her lab rat has turned in the direction Emma wanted, she rewards her with the release of a nice fat edible pellet.
“Perfectly, perfectly right, my dearest Harriet; you are doing just what you ought…It would have grieved me to lose your acquaintance, which must have been the consequence of your marrying Mr. Martin. While you were in the smallest degree wavering, I said nothing about it, because I would not influence; but it would have been the loss of a friend to me. I could not have visited Mrs. Robert Martin, of Abbey-Mill Farm. Now I am secure of you forever.”
That particular danger hadn’t occurred to Harriet (nothing occurs to Harriet that isn’t spelled out for her in large block letters and then dropped on her from a low-flying plane), and her relief is inexpressible. She “would not give up the pleasure and honour of being intimate with (Miss Woodhouse) for any thing in the world.” Not even Mr. Robert Martin’s manly broad shoulders and riveting green eyes. Out of sight, out of mind.
And for this, Emma floods Harriet with even more extravagant praise. “Dear, affectionate creature! You banished to Abbey-Mill Farm! You confined to the society of the illiterate and vulgar all your life! I wonder how the young man could have the assurance to ask it. He must have a pretty good opinion of himself.”
Well, chiquita, you’d know.
Harriet feels compelled to come to Robert Martin’s defense by saying she doesn’t believe he’s conceited…though she has to admit that “since my visiting here I have seen people—and if one comes to compare them, person and manners, there is no comparison at all, oneis so very handsome and agreeable.” Yes, Emma is flashing the ELTON card again; possibly she’s waving it about as though communicating in semaphore.
So suddenly Robert Martin’s ability to write a decent letter doesn’t seem so freakin’ hot. But how, then, to deliver the bad news? What is Harriet to say? What, what, what…? You get the impression that if Emma told her to march up to him, spit on his shoes and then knee him in the groin, Harriet would be off like a shot to do just that. But fortunately Emma advises instead writing to him immediately. She talks Harriet through the whole letter, while insisting that Harriet doesn’t need her help at all; in fact, outside of holding the pen, Harriet’s input is nil. Though looking over Robert’s letter again, for the purposes of answering it, softens her feeling for him so that Emma might have to pluck the pen from her hand and do that job too. Harriet is one of Austen’s most sublimely animal creations; she’s entirely given over to whatever is square in front of her face at any given moment. Her long-term memory can be measured in nanoseconds. You find yourself wondering how on earth she finds her way home every day. Possibly she follows a trail of string laid out for her by Mrs. Goddard.
After the refusal is written, Harriet becomes (for Harriet) reflective, and wonders what her school chum Miss Nash would make of this marriage offer, if she but knew of it, “for Miss Nash thinks her own sister very well married, and it is only to a linen-draper.” Emma just about chokes on her own tongue, and suggests that Harriet’s prospects are much, much superior to any lousy tradesman.
“The attentions of a certain person can hardly be among the tittle-tattle of Highbury yet. Hitherto I fancy you and I are the only people to whom his looks and manners have explained themselves...At this point, perhaps, Mr. Elton is showing your picture to his mother and sisters, telling how much more beautiful is the original, and after being asked for it five or six times, allowing them to hear your name, your own dear name.”
Harriet blushes and giggles, and punches Emma in the arm, and pulls her dress over her head to hide her embarrassment. So far, Emma is playing her like a violin. Or rather like one of those toy balsa-wood guitars made for toddlers, because let’s face it, Harriet’s only got two or three strings to pluck.
Harriet spends the night at Hartfield—and in fact is invited to stay the next several days, because “Emma judged it best in every respect, safest and kindest, to keep her with them as much as possible just at present”, the way you would a dog who you can’t be certain won’t go and wee again on the rug when your back is turned.
While Harriet is off fetching clothes from Mrs. Goddard’s for her stay, Mr. Knightley arrives, and at an awkward moment too because Mr. Woodhouse is just on his way out the door to take a walk about the grounds, something he does for his health at least once a century. But the sight of Mr. Knightley puts him off the idea, and both Emma and Knightley try to persuade him to keep to his original plan, Knightley in particular offering “by his short decided answers, an amusing contrast to the protracted apologies and civil hesitations of the other.” And when Austen says “protracted,” she’s not euphemizing. You might call Mr. Woodhouse one of the author’s epic talkers, only in this instance a better term is epic ditherer.
“Well, I believe, if you will excuse me, Mr. Knightley, if you will not consider me as doing a very rude thing, I shall take Emma’s advice and go out for a quarter of an hour. As the sun is out, I believe I had better take my three turns while I can. I treat you without ceremony, Mr. Knightley. We invalids think we are privileged people…I leave an excellent substitute in my daughter. Emma will be happy to entertain you. And therefore I think I will beg your excuse, and take my three turns—my winter walk.”
And that’s not even the end of it. On he goes, explaining and apologizing, and it just keeps getting funnier and funnier. Many of Austen’s best characters are firecrackers of comic energy; but with Mr. Woodhouse it’s all negative energy—you can sense everyone around him grabbing tightly onto the furniture so they don’t get sucked into his all-consuming void.
When Mr. Woodhouse is finally out the door, Emma and Knightley sit down, and Knightley immediately—and oddly—launches into the subject of Harriet, and speaks “with more voluntary praise than Emma had ever heard before.” She is, he admits, “a pretty little creature, and…in good hands she will turn out a valuable woman.” And his praise isn’t just for Harriet: “(Y)ou have improved her,” he tells Emma. “You have cured her of her school-girl’s giggle; she really does you credit.”
Emma laps this up like cream, and is even more delighted when Knightley says he has “good reason to believe your little friend will soon hear of something to her advantage.” Emma, immediately twigging that this means a proposal (what else could possibly be to Harriet’s advantage? Other than, say, electroshock therapy?), is “more than half in hopes of Mr. Elton’s having dropped a hint” to Knightley about his amorous intentions.
But of course, he’s not talking about Mr. Elton at all. “Robert Martin is the man. Her visit to Abbey-Mill, this summer, seems to have done his business. He is desperately in love and means to marry her.”
“He is very obliging,” Emma shoots back, “but is he sure that Harriet means to marry him?”
Knightley almost laughs at the question. Given Robert Martin’s many sterling qualities, Harriet would have to be a witless dolt to refuse him, a simpleton, a gibbering idiot. Then he pauses, perhaps hearing the words he’s saying, and realizes, Uh-oh.
And in confirmation, Emma wades right in and tells him Robert Martin already did pop the question, and Harriet sent his sorry as a-packin'. Knightley is appalled.
“Harriet Smith refuse Robert Martin? Madness, if it is so; but I hope you are mistaken.”
“I saw her answer; nothing could be clearer.”
“You saw her answer? you wrote her answer too. Emma, this is your doing. You persuaded her to refuse him.”
Royally busted, Emma gets defensive and says even if she did such a thing (which she isn’t saying she did) she wouldn’t be ashamed of it, because after all Robert Martin isn’t Harriet’s equal.
“Not Harriet’s equal!” exclaimed Mr. Knightley, loudly and warmly…”No, he is not her equal, indeed, for he is as much her superior in sense as in situation. Emma, your infatuation about that girl blinds you. What are Harriet Smith’s claims, either of birth, nature, or education, to any connection higher than Robert Martin? She is the natural daughter of nobody knows whom, with probably no settled provision at all, and certainly no respectable relations. She is known only as a parlour-boarder at a common school. She is not a sensible girl, nor a girl of any information…She is pretty, and she is good tempered, and that is all. My only scruple in advising the match was on his account, as being beneath his deserts, and a bad connection for him.”
Way to flame, Big K.
But Emma’s not remotely intimidated. In fact, she loads up her rocket-launcher and fires right back. Robert Martin is “undoubtedly (Harriet’s) inferior as to rank in society. The sphere in which she moves is much above his. It would be a degradation…There can scarcely be a doubt that her father is a gentleman—and a gentleman of fortune. Her allowance is very liberal; nothing has ever been grudged for her improvement or comfort.” Which causes Knightley to remark that it doesn’t matter how rich or noble her father may be, because he’s obviously not in any hurry to introduce her to polite society. No, she’s been “left in Mrs. Goddard’s hands to shift as she can”, which, furthermore, was just fine by her, until Emma got hold of her and started filling her head with ideas that she might secretly be the heir to the throne of Portugal.
“You have been no friend to Harriet Smith, Emma. Robert Martin would never have proceeded so far, if he had not felt persuaded of her not being disinclined to him. I know him well. He has too much real feeling to address any woman on the hap-hazard of selfish passion. And as to conceit, he is the farthest from it of any man I know. Depend upon it, he had encouragement.”
It was most convenient to Emma not to make a direct reply to this assertion; she chose rather to take up her own line of the subject again.
Clearly Emma has had media training. She could easily run for high office.
Instead she changes tack, arguing that Harriet is by Knightley’s own admission very pretty, “and till it appears that men are much more philosophic on the subject of beauty than they are generally supposed; till they do fall in love with well-formed minds instead of handsome faces, a girl, with such loveliness Harriet,” is going to be able to pick and choose from among a field of suitors. “I am very much mistaken,” she winds up, going for an epic smack-down, “if your sex in general would not think such beauty, and such temper, the highest claims a woman could possess.” But then she overplays her hand:
“Were you, yourself, ever to marry, she is the very woman for you.”
And down in the kitchen, the gods of foreshadowing suddenly drop all the copper pots at once, and kick the dog so that it howls. But Emma barely notices, because she’s holding her ground against Knightley’s next full-frontal assault.
“You will puff her up with such ideas of her own beauty…that in a little while, nobody within reach will be good enough for her…Men of sense, whatever you may choose to say, do not want silly wives…and most prudent men would be afraid of the inconvenience and disgrace they might be involved in, when the mystery of her parentage is revealed. Let her marry Robert Martin, and she is safe, respectable, and happy forever...”
In fact, Robert Martin is exactly the man to keep Harriet happy. It wouldn’t be materially different a task from keeping his chickens happy.
But Emma won’t see it, she’s determined to paint Robert Martin as the lowest of the low, deficient in appearance, education, manners, and for all we know hygiene, geometry, and Morris dancing. Whereas Knightley insists that by any objective standard Robert Martin’s character and talents make him as superior to Harriet as is Seabiscuit to a pack mule.
By this time they’re really just talking at instead of to each other, and Emma tries “to look cheerfully unconcerned, but was really feeling uncomfortable, and wanting him very much to be gone.” This is when we like Emma best: when she’s forced to deal with someone who doesn’t play by her rules, who won’t read the lines she’s written for him in her ongoing A&E miniseries The Life of Emma Woodhouse. And so far, Mr. Knightley is the only such holdout (don’t worry, others will follow). We love watching her squirm beneath his opprobrium, especially because he knows her so very well.
In fact, he now even twigs to the fish Emma’s really trying to catch for Harriet, and warns her, “(I)f Elton is the man, I think it will be all labour in vain.” Emma tries to laugh it off, but he mercilessly zeroes in: “Elton may talk sentimentally but he will act rationally. He is as well acquainted with his own claims as you can be with Harriet’s…I am convinced that he does not mean to throw himself away.”
Emma pretends that the idea of pairing Elton with Harriet is the furthest thing from her mind and how delightfully daffy of Knightley to think otherwise, he’s obviously been out in the sun too long or possibly hit his head on a low-lying beam. No, she wants only to keep Harriet to herself for a while, like a little pet spider monkey she knows she must eventually return to the wild.
Knightley, not at all fooled, leaps to his feet and says, “Good morning to you,” then turns on his heel and walks abruptly out, leaving Emma with about three or four really beautifully shaped retorts still poised on her lips. This kind of departure, in Austen-land, is about as disdainful as it gets. He may as well have snapped his fingers in her face, then kicked over his chair as he one-eightied. As a result, Emma is left “in a state of vexation” that’s intermingled with tiresome strains of very inconvenient self-doubt.
In my reading of Pride and Prejudice,I talked about how the lightning-swift, diamond-sharp exchanges between Lizzie and Mr. Darcy prefigured—in fact helped popularize and institutionalize—the kind of repartee we now recognize as the cornerstone of romantic comedy. One of the genre’s many conceits is that the more a man and a woman bicker and abuse each other at the beginning of the story, the more certain it is they’ll be happily canoodling by the end. I’m not saying this with complete approval; the genre is not a favorite of mine, with the usual exceptions-that-prove-the-rule (say, Tracy and Hepburn in Pat and Mike). But Austen is its champion, and the sparks that fly between Emma and Knightley are sparks indeed—meaning they’re both incandescent and incendiary; they delight the ear, but might set fire to the hair. Of course we know the two combatants are destined for each other, but there’s nothing cozy about their path there; it’s a cage match, with repartee as the weapon of choice.
Emma, rendered all itchy by her three rounds with Mr. Knightley, is now further discomfited by the fact that Harriet still hasn’t returned from Mrs. Goddard’s. She fears she might have run into Robert Martin there; because, Harriet being Harriet, fifteen minutes in Robert’s company is more than sufficient for her to lapse into a state of “Emma who?” and accept Robert’s proposal and possibly even register for gifts at the local Farm & Fleet. She’s especially anxious because her goal now is not only to see Harriet married to Mr. Elton for her own sake, but also (and possibly more importantly) to score a point off Mr. Knightley, who’s just declared such a match completely impossible. Emma is certain—certain, you hear—that Knightley has merely projected his own ideas of Mr. Elton’s character onto his friend; if he could only have seen him simpering and sighing and frolicking around Harriet throwing rose petals in the air, wouldn’t he have a different opinion then.
Fortunately for Emma, Harriet arrives back at Highbury babbling not of Mr. Martin but of Mr. Elton, who, through some interminable chain of servant gossip that Harriet details with all the relish of a South Sea islands anthropologist, is now known to have incurred the scorn of his whist club by walking out on a game to attend to a “very particular”errand “which he would not put off for any inducement in the world; and something about a very enviable commission, and being the bearer or something exceedingly precious.” And when charged by a fellow member that, by his speaking in such a fa-la-la manner in that den of masculine privilege, there must be a lady involved, Elton “only looked very conscious and smiling, and rode off in great spirits.” And all the servants in the gossip chain agree that whoever the lady might be is in fact the luckiest lady in the world, because “Mr. Elton had not his equal for beauty or agreeableness,” so that Harriet is reduced to blushing and giggling and climbing on top of the couch and burying her head under the pillows like an ostrich.
Eventually Mr. Elton, his very particularerrand concluded, returns in triumph with the framed portrait, which is hung over the mantelpiece of the sitting room. He languishes beneath it, sighing and fluttering his eyelids and just generally making sure anyone who enters the room won’t be half so impressed by the perfection of the portrait as by his perfect adoration of it. As for Harriet’s feelings, “they were visibly forming themselves into as strong an attachment as her youth and sort of mind admitted,” which is one of Austen’s more subtle snipes.
Now that Harriet's on the path to respectable matrimony, Emma tries to enlarge her mind by drawing her into a program of study, which is about as successful as you’d think it would be; you might as well try to teach a puppy how to sew. “It was much easier to chat than to study; much pleasanter to let her imagination range and work at Harriet’s fortune, than to be labouring to enlarge her comprehension, or exercise it on sober facts”. The only slightly literary endeavor they manage to stick with is collecting riddles in “a thin quarto of hot-pressed paper…ornamented with ciphers and trophies.” Scrapbooking, basically.
These riddles are just the kind of thing Emma completely grooves on, because as whip-smart as she is, she solves them in just seconds flat. (Harriet is completely hopeless; they might as well be written in Urdu. But I can’t be too hard on her, as they pretty much zip right over my head too.) But since Emma’s so very good at them, she runs through them like a bag of tortilla chips, and soon has to put out the word to friends and family that she needs more, more, more of them to feed her voracious habit.
Her father is keen to help, being “almost as much interested in the business as the girls, and tried very often to recollect something worth putting in”, but “it always ended in ‘Kitty, a fair but frozen maid.’” So it’s up to Mr. Elton to come charging to the rescue, his arms overflowing, all bright-eyed and grinning and riddles, riddles, did my lady ask for riddles? (I generally avoid the spate of modern-day Jane Austen “sequels,” but if there’s one in which Mr. Elton is savagely eviscerated by wolves, I would read that.)
Unfortunately, Emma has already transcribed most of the riddles he’s brought her, so she asks, “Why will you not write one yourself for us, Mr. Elton?” And then, oh boy, are we off to the races. Because Mr. Elton supplies a big’un, and Emma and Harriet (well, Emma with Harriet looking on) strive for several pages to solve it, only to discover at the end that it was composed with intent. Here it is:
My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings,Lords of the earth! Their luxury and ease,Another view of man, my second brings,Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
But ah! united, what reverse we have!Man’s boasted power and freedom, all are flown;Lord of the earth and see, he bends a slave,And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.
They ready wit the word will soon supply,May its approval beam in that soft eye!
The ready wit in question of course finally cracks it: “My first” is court; “my second” is ship; and “But ah! united” is courtship.
Yes, Mr. Elton is flirting through riddles.
Now, I’m well aware that some people turn to Jane Austen because modernity is simply too coarse for them, and their preferred escape is to a literary world in which a complex code of manners and behavior provides a filter through which strong emotions are rendered all nice and tidy and scrapbook-ready. And while in my opinion Austen’s great achievement is to show us, relentlessly and hilariously, that this code isn’t even close to being up to the task—still, I get it. I appreciate the impulse, and the epidemic of 21st century crudeness that triggers it.
But man, these riddles. What can I tell you, after just a couple pages of them, I really just wish someone had invented sexting, already.
Anyway, Emma couldn’t be surer of her instincts now, and is probably in her mind already dancing the tarantella on Mr. Knightley’s shattered pride. She tells Harriet that this riddle is proof positive that she’s ensnared her man, and ensured herself a match “which offers nothing but good…it will fix you in the centre of all your real friends, close to Hartfield and to me, and confirm our intimacy for ever. This, Harriet, is an alliance which can never raise a blush in either of us.” As I’ve said, Emma’s most likable when she’s blushing, so it’s really just as well that she’s so spectacularly wrong here.
Harriet, of course, is in a disbelieving dither at her good fortune, and keeps asking Emma for confirmation that it’s all really happening. In that respect, she’s actually cannier than Emma herself, because to her it just doesn’t seem entirely probable, or even possible. Or hell, even sane. But Harriet is the kind of girl who will repeatedly stick her hand into a flame as long as you reassured her each time, “Okay, now it won’t hurt.”
Yet Emma is the one who’s actually delusional. Comparing Harriet and Mr. Elton to Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston, she practically purrs in contemplation of her powers. “Your marrying will be equal to the match at Randalls,” she says. “There does seem to be a something in the air of Hartfield which gives love exactly the right direction, and sends it into the very channel where it ought to flow.” By “something in the air of Hartfield,” she of course means, “me.”
Harriet chatters on about Elton for several pages, all in the line of, “Imagine him choosing me—me of all people—no, imagine it, really—honestly, just imagine it.” She recalls the first time she met him, when “the two Abbots and I ran into the front room and peeped through the blind when we heard he was going by, and Miss Nash came and scolded us away, and staid to look through herself,” and now imagine it, she’s going to marry him! Eventually she spirals back to his soul-revealing riddle, and pauses to laud it in a manner that takes a sideswipe at poor old plebian Robert Martin.
“It is one thing…to have very good sense in a common way, like every body else, and if there is any thing to say, to sit down and write a letter, and say just what you must, in a short way; and another, to write verses and charades like this.”
Emma is so pleased by this correct response that she tosses Harriet a fish, and Harriet claps her fins and does it again for more. Then she jumps through a hoop and plays “Auld Lang Syne” on a pair of squeeze-horns.
But there’s a problem: now that the riddle has been copied into Emma’s book, how to return it to Mr. Elton? Should Harriet let him know his sweet funky lovin’ is out of the bag? And if so how should she say it, where should she stand, what should she wear, should she be demure or bold or maybe just grab his sleeve with her teeth and not let go? Emma bestows the advice she always gives, to everyone and in every situation: “Leave it to me. You do nothing…”
“…He will be back here this evening, I dare say, and then I will give it him back, and some nonsense or other will pass between us and you shall not be committed. Your soft eyes shall choose their own time for beaming. Trust to me.”
Of course Harriet trusts her. No golden retriever was ever more ardently loyal. Except for one brief moment, when Emma hears her father coming in and asks Harriet for permission to read the riddle to him. “He loves any thing of the sort, and especially any thing that pays a woman a compliment.” Harriet balks, and Emma has to bring her round by saying that if Mr. Elton “had been anxious for secrecy, he would not have left the paper while I was by; but he rather pushed it towards me than towards you.”
Harriet hears her; unfortunately, she doesn’t remotely hear herself. You want to tap her on the shoulder and say, “Rerun that last bit a few times, sweetheart. Anything pop out at you?”
Anyway, the riddle does end up delighting Mr. Woodhouse, though he makes no attempt to solve it, choosing instead to once again dredge up “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid”. In fact, it’s almost become his catchphrase. I keep envisioning a vaudeville routine: Mr. Woodhouse doddering onto a stage and clearing his throat, then declaiming, “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,” and immediately getting a pie in the face. It could play two shows a day and three on weekends and never not be funny.
The name “Kitty” reminds Mr. Woodhouse of his elder daughter, Isabella, because “she was very near being christened Catherine after her grand-mamma”—yes, this is how his mind works—and thinking of Isabella happily reminds him that she and her husband (Mr. Knightley’s elder brother, remember) will be visiting soon, though he hates to think how shocked she’ll be not to find Miss Taylor here. Even worse, she’s staying only a week, then that horrid man will take her back out into the brutal world. “I think, Emma, I shall try and persuade her to stay longer with us. She and the children might stay very well.” Also, I’m pretty sure he’s considering how if he cuts them up and hides the parts under the floorboards of different rooms, they won’t be able to leave at all.
As if to lend weight to this theory, he says, speaking of his grandchildren, “They will come and stand by my chair and say, ‘Grandpapa, can you give me a bit of string?’ and once Henry asked me for a knife, but I told him knives were only made for grandpapas.”
And yet a sentence later he’s complaining that their father’s too rough with them, and then laments the way their uncle “tosses them up to the ceiling in a very frightful way.” Well…I suppose it’s only kinetic violence Mr. Woodhouse disapproves him. I can easily imagine him slowly smothering the life out of his nearest and dearest. Afterwards they’d all be so wonderfully quiet and finally stop that awful dashing off hither and yon.
Later in the morning Mr. Elton drops by—Harriet girlishly turns away at the sight of him, which is probably just as well as she’s undoubtedly gone all goggle-eyed and pendulum-tongued—and Emma’s “quick eye soon discerned in his the consciousness of having made a push—of having thrown a die; and she imagined he was come to see how it might turn up.”
This is the kind of game Emma likes to play most of all, without realizing what an amazing cock-up she is at it. She hurls herself in now, guns blazing and eyelashes batting, and returns the riddle and thanks him for it. “We admired it so much, that I have ventured to write it into Miss Smith’s collection…Of course I have not transcribed beyond the eight first lines”—the final two being, of course, too revealing of the author’s percolating testosterone.
Mr. Elton is a little confused at first, but rises to the occasion and undertakes some banter with Emma, rife with hidden meanings, and then grandly departs—while Harriet has remained the entire time with her face to the wall, biting her fingernails and making clubbed-baby-seal noises.
As for his departure, “Emma could not think it too soon; for with all his good and agreeable qualities there was a sort of parade in his speeches which was very apt to incline her to laugh.” Laugh at him while you can, chiquita. Because as we’ll soon see, the joke is oh so very on you.