To Emma the loss of the ball and her partner is a severe disappointment. She finds Jane Fairfax’s comparative composure on the misfortune odious. But she is a little softened by hearing of the bad headaches from which Jane has been suffering, and is willing to admit that her unbecoming indifference may proceed from the apathy engendered by bad health.
Emma has arrived at the point of believing she returns Frank Churchill’s love. At first, when she misses him and the ball most, she fancies she is very much in love; then the “very much” dwindles down to a “little,” since Emma, who is still quite capable of reasoning on her feelings, makes the acute observation, that though she admires and likes him, she continues to see faults in him; and she notices that in all the imaginary scenes and dialogues which she invents for herself and Frank Churchill, while he is to urge his suit with all the eloquence of passion and true affection, she is always to refuse him, in the tenderest and most delicate manner indeed, but still to refuse him. Their love is inevitably destined to subside into friendship.
Emma had long ago determined never to quit her father, but it strikes her now—that were she strongly attached to Frank, there would be, even in anticipation, more struggle in the sacrifice.
Having come to this sage conclusion, Emma is a little sorry for Frank; the next thing is to provide him with a substitute for the wife he can never win from Hartfield. Her own partiality for her friend, and desire to atone to her for her former error, together with an accidental polite reference in one of his letters to his step-mother, puts Harriet Smith into Emma’s creative brain. For she is not cured of match-making, she is still inveterately possessed with what is most apt to be the clever, warm-hearted matron’s mania for arranging the matrimonial affairs of others.
In fact, Emma, with all her youthful pride and dignity, is in some danger of becoming a meddler and busybody in other people’s business. Even the knowledge she might have had of how different are Mr. and Mrs. Weston’s—not to say Mr. and Mrs. Churchill’s—expectations for their son and nephew, does not serve to crush the foolish idea, though it only lurks in the background in the meantime.
III.
A new event stirs Highbury. Mr. Elton brings home his bride. She is first seen in her pew at church, and is ecstatically admired.
Emma withholds her judgment, even beyond the opportunity given by her first call at the vicarage, when she takes Harriet Smith with her. Emma will not pronounce an opinion yet, beyond the very modified admission that Mrs. Elton is “elegantly dressed,” while the meekly magnanimous little goose, Harriet, finds the bride “beautiful, very beautiful,” and adds, with a sigh, “Happy creature! He called her ‘Augusta;’ how delightful!”
On farther acquaintance, Emma discovers, with a certain severe satisfaction, that Mr. Elton, as she has learnt to know him, is fitly mated.
Mrs. Elton is one of Jane Austen’s most cleverly and sharply-drawn characters. The pretentious, underbred woman, “pert and familiar,” without the faintest sense of her own deficiencies—on the contrary, with an overflowing self-satisfaction and self-conceit patronising everybody and everything—is hit to the life. We have all heard similar boasting to that of Mrs. Elton on the subject of her rich Bristol brother-in-law’s house, “Maple Grove.” We have listened to like-minded proposals “to explore” with the Sucklings, when they bring over their barouche-landau, our own accessible, familiar neighbourhood, every step of which is intimately known to us. We have been recommended to watering-places, and offered introductions by those whom we were tempted to regard as little called upon or qualified to give us advice and assistance. We have been treated to the modern “doubles” of all Mrs. Elton’s bridal airs and affectations; that sporting of the newly-acquired importance of the matron; that literal quoting, in the worst taste, of Mr. E. and the “cara sposa;” that free and easy manner of naming our own familiar friends by their surnames,[56] as if the men were the new comer’s special cronies; that vulgar superciliousness with regard to the supposed disadvantages and consequent inferiority of other people whom we have every reason to esteem and cherish. Have we not been in danger of crying out with Emma, “Insufferable woman! worse than I had supposed. Absolutely insupportable! Knightley! I could not have believed it. Knightley! Never seen him in her life before, and call him Knightley! and discover that he is a gentleman! A little, upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr. E. and her cara sposa, and her resources, and all her airs of pert pretension and underbred finery,[57] actually to discover that Mr. Knightley is a gentleman! I doubt whether he will return the compliment, and discover her to be a lady. I could not have believed it! And to propose that she and I should unite to form a musical club! One would fancy we were bosom friends! And Mrs. Weston! Astonished that the person who brought me up should be a gentlewoman! Worse and worse! I never met with her equal. Much beyond my hopes! Harriet is disgraced by any comparison.”