"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_.
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