Oh Emma!

Our Emma is not always terribly self-aware or realizing what she’s been thinking or feeling. Sometimes we as her audience can see things she isn’t catching on to.

This one cracked me up on a recent reread.

Emma M. Lion, June 25: “Maggie Devereux, at sixteen years of age, paid two sailors to kidnap, tie up, and place in a rowboat one Mr. Revel, wealthy American businessman ten years her senior!

“I. KNOW. NOT. WHAT. TO. SAY.

“My entire life of misadventures feels like a pale sham of conglomerate effort.

“My dancing on the stage of The Drunken Duck?

“Child’s play.

“‘You look shocked,’ Mr. Revel said, bringing me back to the present. ‘Perhaps I had misjudged your sense of joie de vivre.’ I daresay he had, to a degree. Emma M. Lion is a great many things, but I have never considered paying sailors to kidnap a grown man and cast off to sea in nothing more than a rowboat. The scenario has never crossed my mind.

“Nary a once.”

Emma M. Lion, March 6 (just 3.5 months before): “I decided right then and there that, should me courage ever fail me, I would kidnap Hawkes, take him to a faraway place, and make him quote Shakespeare all the day long.”

What other instances have you noticed of Emma not being terribly self-aware?