“You will not ask me what is the point of envy. – You are determined, I see, to have no curiosity. – You are wise – but I cannot be wise. Emma, I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment.”
“Oh! then, don’t speak it, don’t speak it,” she eagerly cried.
– Jane Austen
Emma, Chapter 49. Nearly everything that Emma and Mr. Knightley say to one another in this chapter is misinterpreted. Here she wrongly thinks that he is about to confide his affection for Harriet and tries to silence him. And he starts out believing Emma to be pained at the loss of Frank Churchill until she says she was never attached to him. The reality is that Mr. Knightley is about to change both of their lives by proposing to Emma.