"What are you crying for, Emily?" her mother had once said to her, when she was a little child.
"I'm not Emily now," she answered; "I'm the poor little owl, and I can't help crying because that cruel Smokey barked at me and frightened me, and pulled several of my best feathers out."
And now, just the same, Emily was Justina, and such thoughts as Justina might be supposed to be thinking passed through Emily's mind somewhat in this way:—
"No; it is not at all fair! I have been like a ninepin set up in the game of other people's lives, only to be knocked down again; and yet without me the game could not have been played. Yes; I have been made useful, for through me other people have unconsciously set him against matrimony. If they would but have let him alone"—(Oh, Justina! how can you help thinking now?)—"I could have managed it, if I might have had all the game to myself."
Next to the power of standing outside one's self, and looking at me as other folks see me, the most remarkable is this of (by the insight of genius and imagination) becoming you. The first makes one sometimes only too reasonable, too humble; the second warms the heart and enriches the soul, for it gives the charms of selfhood to beings not ourselves.
"Yet it is a happy thing for some of us," thought Emily, finishing her cogitations in her own person, "that the others are not allowed to play all the game themselves."
When Brandon got home John saw his wife quietly look at him. "Now what does that mean?" he thought; "it was something more than mere observance of his entering. Those two have means of transport for their thoughts past the significance of words. Yes, I'm right; she goes into the dining-room, and he will follow her. Have they found it out?"
All the guests were standing in a small morning-room, taking coffee; and Brandon presently walking out of the French window into the garden, came up to the dining-room outside. There was Dorothea.
"Love," she said, looking out, "what do you think? Some of these names have been changed."
"Perhaps a waft of wind floated them off the plates," said Brandon, climbing in over the window-ledge, "and the servants restored them amiss. But, Mrs. Brandon, don't you think if that baby of yours squalls again after lunch, he had better drink his own health himself somewhere else? I say, how nice you look, love!—I like that gown."