Emma, chapters 19-21

The second volume of the triple-decker that is Emmaopens with its heroine out walking with Harriet Smith. This isn’t very remarkable; we’ve already learned that Harriet’s principal value to Emma is that of someone to walk with, and to talk with while walking with. But that’s not working out so well this morning, because Harriet is disappointed in love, and has, “in Emma’s opinion, been talking enough of Mr. Elton that day.” Yet however much Emma tries to change the subject, it happens to “burst out again when she thought she had succeeded,” because, like many a teenage girl before and after her, Harriet can turn any subject ‘round to the guy that got away. The price of salt cod?...The Russo-Persian war?...The Yazoo land scandal?...Harriet will find Mr. Elton in there somewhere.
When the two young women find themselves in the neighborhood where Mrs. and Miss Bates reside, Emma decides “to call upon them and seek safety in numbers.” She can also kill two birds with one stone, because her neglect of the Bates ladies is seen as a defect by those “very few who presumed ever to see imperfection in her” (why not just come out and say the Knightley brothers?), so she can make a show of being better than their opinion of her, while at the same time putting the kibosh of Harriet’s annoying Eltonmania.
This is a desperate tack for Emma, because she really doesn’t like visiting the Bateses. And I mean really really doesn’t like it. To her it’s “very disagreeable,—a waste of time—tiresome women—and all the horror of being in danger of falling in with the second rate and third rate of Highbury, who were calling on them for ever, and therefore she seldom went near them.” Even worse, if they’ve had a letter from their niece—the dreaded Jane Fairfax—Emma will be stuck there for the better part of a geologic age as the letter is read and re-read and analyzed and deconstructed and translated into Latin and copied onto lengths of ribbon and tied to the feet of doves who are then sent flying off to paradise. But Emma, calculating from the date of the last such letter, figures she’s safe from any new one today.
And so she and Harriet bop up to the humble little apartment above the street, and we finally, at this late stage of the novel, get our first full, unadulterated dose of Mrs. and Miss Bates. Actually, just the latter; the former is basically a nullity—she’s ancient and she knits, is about the sum total of her character. But Miss Bates!...Sweet lawd jebus save us. One of Austen’s titanically great creations. She introduces her as the elder lady’s “more active, talking daughter,” which is sort of like Shakespeare introducing Richard III as a “busy, thinking prince.” The fact is, Miss Bates is the greatest of all Austen’s epic talkers; she is unstoppably garrulous. Her volubility is a kind of existential phenomenon: she talks and talks and talks, with enormous energy and breathtaking velocity, and says absolutely nothing, nada, zilch, niente. Each word is like a grain of sand in a vast desert of utter triviality. She is relentless; she is superhuman; she is mercilessly, cruelly, immortally funny.
Here she is, for instance, on the subject of Jane Fairfax’s latest letter (because of course Emma got her calculations wrong, and there has been a new piece of correspondence from Emma’s very bestest-ever frenemy). At first Miss Bates can’t locate the missive and Emma thinks maybe she’s safe, but no, it turns up:
“Oh, here it is. I was sure it could not be far off; but I had put my huswife upon it, you see, without being aware, and so it was quite hid, but I had it in my hand so very lately that I was almost sure it must be on the table. I was reading it to Mrs. Cole, and, since she went away, I was reading it again to my mother, for it is such a pleasure to her—a letter from Jane—that she can never hear it often enough; so I knew it could not be far off, and here it is, only just under my huswife,—and since you are so kind as to wish to hear what she says; but, first of all, I must really, in justice to Jane, apologise for her writing so short a letter, only two pages you see, hardly two, and in general she fills the whole paper and crosses half. My mother often wonders that I can make it out so well. She often says, when the letter is first opened, ‘Well, Hetty, now I think you will be put to it to make out all that checker-work’—don’t you, ma’am? And then I tell her, I am sure she would contrive to make it out herself, if she had nobody to do it for her, every word of it,—I am sure she would pore over it till she had made out every word. And, indeed, though my mother’s eyes are not so good as they were, she can see amazingly well still, thank God! with the help of spectacles. It is such a blessing! My mother’s are really very good indeed. Jane often says, when she is here, ‘I am sure, grandmamma, you must have had very strong eyes to see as you do—and so much fine work as you have done too!—I only wish my eyes may last me as well.’”
This is just the warm-up to the letter, keep in mind. She hasn’t even read the first freakin’ line yet. You begin to feel Emma’s will to live sap slowly, inexorably away.
The substance of the letter’s not-quite-two-pages, which require Miss Bates nearly double that to summarize, is that Jane Fairfax, absent from Highbury for two years, is coming back for a visit. The family with whom she’s been living, the Campbells, are going to Ireland to see their newly married daughter, whose husband has a grand county-seat there.
“…(It is) a beautiful place, I fancy. Jane has heard a great deal of its beauty,—from Mr. Dixon, I mean,—I do not know that she ever heard about it from any body else,—but it was very natural, you know, that he should like to speak of his own place while he was paying his addresses,—and as Jane used to be very often walking out with them,—for Colonel and Mrs. Campbell were very particular about their daughter’s not walking out often with only Mr. Dixon, for which I do not at all blame them: of course she heard every thing he might be telling Miss Campbell about his home in Ireland…He is a most amiable, charming young man, I believe. Jane was quite longing to go to Ireland, from his account of things.”
And yet, Jane is not going to Ireland, to visit this charming Mr. Dixon and his wife, who was her childhood friend; but is instead coming back to Highbury to stay with her aunt and grandmother, where the odds of having anything like a pleasant time aren’t so much unlikely as statistically nonexistent. This prompts “an ingenious and animating suspicion” in Emma’s brain, and she slyly asks for more details—and learns that the Campbells themselves are quite mad for Jane to come, in fact they’re at the point of roping and tying her and dragging her along behind them like a rodeo steer.
Yet Jane steadfastly refuses—and this despite owing Mr. Dixon her life. For it seems that during a certain yachting party, the sails were whipping around in a manner that at one point would have “dashed (Jane) into the sea” but for Mr. Dixon stepping in and manfully taking hold of her. “I can never think of it without trembling!” Miss Bates says, adding that ever since “I have been so fond of Mr. Dixon!”
And probably not just you, Emma thinks—a supposition made stronger when she recalls that the Campbell’s daughter “has no remarkable degree of personal beauty,—is not by any means to be compared with Miss Fairfax.” Suddenly Emma’s not so totally unwilling to hear more of her hostess’s inane prattle. In fact, were Miss Bates to clam up now, Emma might very well flip her onto the carpet and press her knee in her back until she agreed to say more.
No worries, of course, because the only inducement Miss Bates needs to talk is an atmosphere of sufficient density to carry sound waves. She gladly relays how Jane has pleaded illness to avoid the Irish trip, and the Campbells have been forced to agree that a return to the air of her native county might benefit her. This propels Miss Bates into such an extended fit of declamation (“You may guess, dear Miss Woodhouse, what a flurry it has thrown me in! If it was not from the drawback of her illness—but I am afraid we must expect to see her grown thin, and looking very poorly. I must tell you what an unlucky thing happened to me as to that...” etc.) that by the time she’s recovered herself, and is ready to—y’know—actually read the goddamn letter—Emma regrets that she’s stayed past her allotted time, and must go.
And not all that could be urged to detain her succeeded. She regained the street, happy in this, that though much had been forced on her against her will, though she had, in fact, heard the whole substance of Jane Fairfax’s letter, she had been able to escape the letter itself.
Probably Miss Bates’s voice is still ringing in her ears twenty minutes after she leaves. I know it’s still ringing in mine.
Austen now presses pause, and shuttles back to cover Jane Fairfax’s back story—though being sophisticated readers, we’ve already inferred most of it. But the novel was a new form back when Emmawas first published, so Austen presumably felt obliged to fill in all the blanks, cross all the T’s, and spackle in all the cracks.
Jane, we learn, is the poor orphaned child of Mrs. Bates’s youngest daughter, about whom nothing is said; but we can presume that as the younger sister of Miss Bates she grew to womanhood without ever getting a word in edgewise. This lady’s husband, one Lieutenant Fairfax, died in action abroad, triggering his wife’s subsequent death from grief—so right away we’re off to a swell start—and toddler Jane fell into the lap of her aunt and grandmother.
There she might have languished forever, were it not for a certain Col. Campbell, who owed his life to Jane’s father and chose to repay the debt by taking on Jane’s expenses…and then eventually taking on Jane herself, as a companion for his dog-faced daughter, since the two girls had become fast friends over the course of many visits. And “from that period Jane had belonged to Col. Campbell’s family, and had lived with them entirely, only visiting her grandmother from time to time.”
The Campbells were very fond of Jane and gave her an excellent education, with the idea that eventually—when their own daughter was married and established in her own home—that Jane should make a living educating others, as a teacher or governess, those being the only honorable professions open to a young lady of Jane’s qualities at the time (the Hooters franchise not having yet been established). But when the time came, and Miss Campbell “became Mrs. Dixon and was carried off to Ireland,” the Campbells found that Jane “was too much beloved to be parted with”—so that the day of her finally beginning her destined career has been continually postponed, with a stream of excuses such as Oh, she’s still too young, or Oh, she’s not really in the best of health, or Oh, it might rain today, or Oh, it’s time for lunch.
Eventually Jane herself girds her loins and sets her twenty-first year as the time for her “to complete the sacrifice, and retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever.” Which is a rather fine whine about what will essentially be looking after a few pampered brats in their parents’ undoubtedly comfortable home. It’s not like Jane’s going to be forced to do forty hours a week of data entry in a cubicle, or anything.
Austen makes much of the fact that everyone in the Campbell clan—father, mother, hatchet-faced daughter—is just crazy about Jane, which is “the more honourable to each party from the circumstance of Jane’s decided superiority both in beauty and acquirements. That nature had given it in feature could not be unseen by the young woman, nor could her higher powers of mind be unfelt by the parents.” Apparently, Jane’s just one of those people you ought to hate but can’t; she seems to win over everyone who comes within twenty yards of her, like she excretes ambrosial pheremones or something…everyone, that is, except Emma.
Which is what has brought up the interesting possibility—immediately seized on by Emma’s suspicious mind (she’s a bit of a “busy, thinking” sort herself)—that there’s more to Jane’s return to Highbury than meets the eye. To be sure, her claim of ill health is no lie, since she “had never been quite well since the time of (the Campbells’) daughter’s marriage” and suffers from “a weakened frame and varying spirits” (pointless aside: Varying Spirits will be my next band name). But Austen even admits to a measure of skullduggery. “With regard to (Jane) not accompanying them to Ireland, her account to her aunt contained nothing but the truth, though there might be some truths not told.” Oh reaaaally? And again, because we’re sophisticated readers, we suspect (along with Emma) that the unavoidable comparisons between Miss Fairfax and Miss Campbell can’t have escaped Mr. Dixon’s notice on those innumerable walks they all took together. In fact, you have to wonder what private moments might have passed between Jane and Mr. Dixon on those walks, when Miss Campbell was momentarily distracted by, say, chasing a squirrel up a tree. Could Jane’s return to Highbury actually be a kind of flight? And from what? Disappointment?...Guilt?...Temptation?...A memory of sweet monkey mojo in the moonlight?
Despite these tantalizing conjectures, which you might expect would provide quite a meal for someone as deviously inclined as Emma, she doesn’t look forward to the opportunity of actually examining the Jane herself for first-hand evidence of emotional turmoil. Quite the opposite.
Emma was sorry to have to pay civilities to a person she did not like through three long months!—to be always doing more than she wished, and less than she ought. Why she did not like Jane Fairfax might be a difficult question to answer…”she could never get acquainted with her: she did not know how it was, but there was such coldness and reserve—such apparent indifference whether she pleased or not…and she was made such a fuss with by every body!—and it had been always imagined that they were to be so intimate—because their ages were the same, every body had supposed they must be so fond of each other.” These were her reasons; she had no better.
Well, give the girl a break…that’s plenty.
It should be pretty clear by now that I’m no Fairfax fan myself. In her, I see the resurrection of Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price—clawing her way into this novel, like a zombie from its grave, to come staggering around where she’s not wanted, frightening the cats and setting the dogs to barking. I like to think that Austen, having got Fanny Price-worship out of her system—presumably askin to going cold turkey off heroin—can now look back and see what a mistake she made; and is giving us Jane Fairfax as a kind of corrective, almost an apology: “See here? I get it now; I understand that a dainty little cipher who binds herself up in propriety can be a relentless, stabbing pain in the ass.”
And yet, like most addicts in recovery, she hasn’t quite shaken off the old demons entirely; and the wavering of resolve she feels, are passed right along to Emma, whose dislike of Jane Fairfax is “so little just,—every imputed fault was so magnified by fancy,—that she never saw Jane Fairfax, the first time after any considerable absence, without feeling that she injured her”. And in fact, when the two girls do meet again, Emma is knocked out by “the very appearance and manners, which for those two whole years she had been depreciating. Jane Fairfax was very elegant, remarkably elegant; and she had herself the highest value for elegance.”
When she took in her history, indeed, her situation, as well as her beauty; when she considered what all this elegance was destined to, what she was going to sink from, how she was going to live, it seemed impossible to feel any thing but compassion and respect; especially, if to every well-known particular, entitling her to interest, were added the highly probably circumstance of an attachment to Mr. Dixon, which she had so naturally started herself.
Yes, especially that; and now that it comes to it, Emma can’t even muster the energy to dwell on the more lurid possibilities of that unfortunate attraction. She “was very willing now to acquit her of having seduced Mr. Dixon’s affections from his wife, or of any thing mischievous which her imagination had suggested at first. If it were love, it might be simple, single, successless love on her side alone.”
So Emma’s determined to give Jane another chance, and really try to like her this time—like a precocious adolescent who’s ready to have another go at brussels sprouts. She’s so far gone in “softened, charitable feelings, as made her look around in walking home, and lament that Highbury afforded no man worthy of giving (Jane) independence,—nobody that she could wish to scheme about for her.” Yes, Emma really is one of those people who will just keep on touching the scalding-hot stove until her blistered, wounded hand just falls right off.
But then she spends ten minutes actually talkingto Jane and everything snaps right back to its default setting. At an evening engagement at Hartfield, Jane is “so cold, so cautious! There was no getting at her real opinion. Wrapt up in a cloak of politeness, she seemed determined to hazard nothing. She was disgustingly, was suspiciously reserved.” Emma fishes like crazy for some hint at the truth about Jane’s history with Mr. Dixon, and comes up empty every time. And “the like reserve prevailed on other topics.”
(Jane) and Mr. Frank Churchill had been at Weymouth at the same time. It was known that they were a little acquainted; but not a syllable of real information could Emma procure as to what he truly was. “Was he handsome?”—“She believed he was reckoned a fine young man.”—“Was he aggreable?”—“He was generally thought so.”—“Did he appear a sensible young man; a young man of information?”—“At a watering-place, or in a common London acquaintance, it was difficult to decide on such points…She believed every body found his manners pleasing.” Emma could not forgive her.
It’s a lovely irony Austen offers up here: in a single family, we have an aunt who’s a virtual avatar of logorrhea, and a niece who can barely be made to cough up a half-dozen syllables. She’s on form here, our J.A.—very much on form.
Emma’s low opinion of Jane Fairfax is not shared by Mr. Knightley (hell—it’s not shared by anybody), and that gentleman has a history of riding Emma’s backside without a saddle where her treatment of Jane is concerned. So he’s tickled pink by the sight of Emma and Jane paired off on a settee, their heads together in private talk; he’s unaware that Emma is furiously trying to get Jane to commit to just…one…thing. (“What’s your favorite cheese?” “I must own, I enjoy them all.” “Which do you like better, Christmas or Easter?” “In the winter I generally prefer the former; in the spring, the latter.” “Shall I poke you in the eye, or pull your forefinger all the way back?” “Whichever you prefer; for myself, am indifferent.”)
The next day Mr. Knightley openly commends Emma for the improvement in her manners towards Jane. Emma replies, a bit frostily, “I am happy you approved…but I hope I am not often deficient in what is due to guests at Hartfield.”
And then, once again, we’re transported into the ring, with Knightley in one corner, Emma in the other, their gloves shielding their faces, and circling, circling. Emma gets in the first jab, right at Knightley’s kisser, when she sniffs that “Miss Fairfax is reserved”, but he easily dances away from it, then prances back smiling.
“My dear Emma…you are not going to tell me, I hope, that you had not a pleasant evening.”
“Oh, no; I was pleased with my own perseverance in asking questions, and amused to think how little information I obtained.”
It’s a good start, and we’re hoping for another epic bout between them, like their knock-down-drag-out over Frank Churchill; but unfortunately Mr. Woodhouse is present, and being utterly clueless to the crackling sexual dynamic between his daughter and her dreamy-eyed antagonist, he chooses this moment to go off on an extended monologue about whether he ought to send a leg of pork to the Bateses, because what if they salt it too heavily. When he hears that Emma has already sent them a whole hind-quarter, he launches right into a dizzy dissertation on which is the less risky for oversalting, and through the whole thing you can pretty much picture Emma and Mr. Knightley staring at him in increasing despair and thinking Please sweet lord God in heaven not one more word about salt pork.
And when he’s finally finished, Mr. Knightley’s like, Thank God (maybe he runs his hand over his jaw, to check whether, after all that, he might need a shave). Then he turns back to Emma—their tiff over Jane Fairfax now forgotten (salted over, you might say)—and slyly says, “Emma…I have a piece of news for you.” And he teases her with it, while she hops up and down to hear it, like a macaw being offered something shiny.
But Mr. Knightley draws out the suspense too long, because who should burst in to spoil everything—not only the surprise, but the longed-for respite from salt pork—but Miss Bates, with Jane Fairfax blowing in behind her like a tumbleweed. “Full of thanks and full of news, (she) knew not which to give quickest” and so she decides to just handle both at once, by mashing them into together in one epic blurt. “My dear Miss Woodhouse—I come quite overpowered. Such a beautiful hind-quarter of pork! You are too bountiful! Have you heard the news? Mr. Elton is going to be married.”
Mr. Knightley admits to Emma that this was the story with which he’d been tantalizing her; and Miss Bates is surprised he's already heard, and asks how he came to hear of it. Which in an ordinary human being born of a mother's womb and not a hellspawn spat up from the devil’s lower intestine, would involve saying, “Mr. Knightley, how came you to hear of it?” But with Miss Bates it goes like this:
“But where could you hear it?” cried Miss Bates. “Where could you possibly hear it, Mr. Knightley? For it is not five minutes since I received Mrs. Cole’s note—no, it cannot be more than five—or at least ten—for I had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready to come out—I was only gone down to speak to Patty again about the park—Jane was standing in the passage—were you not, Jane?—for my mother was so afraid that we had not any salting-pan large enough. So I said, I would go down and see, and Jane said, ‘Shall I go down instead? for I think you have a little cold, and Patty has been washing the kitchen.’—‘Oh, my dear,’ said I—well, and just then came the note. A Miss Hawkins—that’s all I know—a Miss Hawkins of Bath. But, Mr. Knightley, how could you possibly have heard of it? for the very moment Mr. Cole told Mrs. Cole of it, she sat down and wrote to me. A Miss Hawkins—”
At which point Mr. Knightley is compelled to interrupt her. Possibly with a blunt instrument.
Really, I just love Miss Bates. She’s phenomenal. Ask her how to get from her parlor to her sitting room, and she’ll give you directions longer than you’d get for a trip from Istanbul to Riyadh.
Now that the news is out, it’s to be thrashed over like a meaty bone among a pack of hyenas—all except for Jane Fairfax, of course, who holds herself aloof from the general feeding frenzy. Miss Bates, engaging in what an analyst might call “projection,” says to her:
“…Jane, you have never seen Mr. Eton:—no wonder that you have such a curiosity to see him.”
Jane’s curiosity did not appear of the absorbing nature as wholly to occupy her.
This is very funny stuff, especially since it helps further fix Jane’s character. By now, we’re pretty sure that if she were tied to some train tracks with a locomotive bearing down on her, her efforts to wriggle free would not be of such an absorbing nature as wholly to occupy her.
Most of the ensuing discussion is taken up, as you might expect, by Miss Bates’s saga-length discursions, but whenever anyone else can get his or her two cents in, it’s all in aid of wondering what kind of lady this Miss Hawkins must be, to land such a catch as Mr. Elton, who—Emma explains to Jane—is considered “the standard of perfection in Highbury, both in person and in mind.” Yes, she really says this; she's that shameless.
Eventually the subject peters out—because of course no one knows a goddamn thing about Miss Hawkins, and there’s only so long you can dance around a subject you’re completely ignorant of, even with Miss Bates and her apocalyptic mouth factored in—and everyone takes his or her leave. Miss Bates’s parting words are notable, in that they comprise more sheer verbiage than Jane Fairfax has managed during the entirety of the chapter, and managed to touch on every single one of its principal themes, whether or not they're in context or even coherent.
“…This has been a most agreeable piece of news indeed. I shall just go round by Mrs. Cole’s; but I shall not stop three minutes: and Jane, you had better go home directly—I would not have you out in a shower! We think she is better for Highbury already. Thank you, we do indeed. I shall not attempt calling on Mrs. Goddard, for I really do not think she cares for any thing but boiled pork; when we dress the leg it will be another thing. Good morning to you, my dear sir. Oh, Mr. Knightley is coming too. Well, that is so very!—I am sure if Jane is tired, you will be so kind as to give her your arm. Mr. Elton, and Miss Hawkins. Good morning to you.”
Good morning? Surely it’s good afternoon, by now. Possibly even good evening. Or, hell, Merry Christmas.
But, oh. Just wait. Because it ain't over.
We’ve seen this phenomenon before, in previous Austen novels: some epic talker will browbeat us into submission for six or seven pages—and another character will take it as a kind of thrown gauntlet, and come roaring back to top the performance with one exponentially more logorrheic. In this case it’s Harriet Smith, of all people—who’s up to now been more of a natterer, emitting a low but steady stream of nothing much more than oh goodness me’s and heavens and dear me whatever nexts and really Miss Woodhouses do you think so’s.
But now…well, just push back the furniture to make room for her. 
Emma, feeling that Harriet must hear the news of Mr. Elton’s upcoming nuptials from her, before the rest of Highbury gets the news, is just waiting out the rain before venturing forth to Mrs. Goddard’s. But before she can get out the door Harriet herself bursts obligingly in, “with just the heated, agitated look which hurrying thither with a full heart was likely to give,” and Emma’s like, Oops, too late.
But in fact Harriet has come about something else entirely, which she relates at such tremendous length, and utilizing such a quantity!—really such an astonishing number!—of exclamation points! Why, you’d think her in danger of exhausting the available planetary supply and leaving future generations none to use in their own extremities of astonishment or incredulity! Really, none at all!
The upshot is, Harriet, having been caught in the cloudburst, sought to escape it by ducking into the haberdasher’s shop, and who else should be there but “Elizabeth Martin and her brother! Dear Miss Woodhouse! only think. I thought I should have fainted.” There’s a lot of I-looked-at-her-but-then-she-looked-away and vice-versa and rinse and repeat, and a lot of very specific Not Talking and Moving Casually about, until at length Robert Martin finally twigs to Harriet’s presence. Hushed words with his sister follow.
“…I could not help thinking that he was persuading her to speak to me—(do you think he was, Miss Woodhouse?)—for presently she came forward—came quite up to me, and asked me how I did, and seemed ready to shake hands, if I would. She did not do any of it in the same way that she used; I could see that she was altered; but however, she seemed to tryto be very friendly, and we shook hands, and stood talking some time; but I know no more what I said—I was in such a tremble! I remember she said she was sorry we never met now; which I thought almost too kind!”
Eventually Robert Martin himself stepped forward and offered her a few courteous words on an alternate route to Hartfield, where she might avoid puddles. Oh, that sweet-talker. It sure seems to have worked on Harriet, who was of course ready to faint every three-point-five seconds, and trembling and quaking and shivering so that it was a miracle she didn’t vibrate all the nails right out of the floorboards.
Harriet of course now begs for Emma’s advice on what to do, because that’s worked out so well for her this far. Emma herself, amazingly, isn’t ready with the mot juste. She finds she’s actually “obliged to stop and think.” But for Emma, stopping and thinking really means, stopping and finding justification for the prejudices she’s already latched onto. It’s interesting to watch this process unfold.
The young man’s conduct, and his sister’s, seemed the result of real feeling, and she could not but pity them. As Harriet described it, there had been an interesting mixture of wounded affection and genuine delicacy in their behaviour: but she had believed them to be well-meaning, worthy people, before; and what difference did this make in the evils of the connection? It was folly to be disturbed by it. Of course, he must be sorry to lose her,—they must all be sorry; ambition, as well as love, had probably been mortified. They might all have hoped to rise by Harriet’s acquaintance; and besides, what was the value of Harriet’s description? So easily pleased,—so little discerning,—what signified her praise?
These are the moments we find it hardest to like Emma. And when she follows through with her advice to Harriet (“It might be distressing for the moment…but you seem to have behaved extremely well; and it is over,—and may never,—can never, as a first meeting,—occur again, and therefore you need not think about it”) we really do want to pull her hair, or flick her ear or something.
Emma’s actually grateful to be able now to distract Harriet with the news of Mr. Elton; and Harriet—like a baby in a crib, fascinated by whatever bright new object her mobile wafts her way—is soon entirely absorbed by that subject, and awash in the various feelings and speculations and exclamation points it provokes.
As we leave Emma, she’s feeling pretty dang satisfied at having regained her control over Harriet, and at having secured her from those grasping, ambitious, social-climbing Martins. Poor Emma. She’s a would-be Machiavelli, but she keeps mistaking every skirmish for the whole campaign. 
Next time, a new face joins the fray—that of the long anticipated, and many times heralded, Mr. Frank Churchill—but he doesn’t come as an ally. Though Emma won’t know that immediately. Nor, of course, do we want her to. We’re vicious that way. But then…so is Emma’s creator. God bless her caustic, calculating heart.