This is the crucial turning point for Emma. She has to acknowledge and try to come to terms with what she has done to Harriet and with the fact that she herself loves George. The situational irony is very strong indeed: Harriet, taught by Emma to look above herself, has looked to the very man who is exactly right for Emma. One could hardly be more fully caught in her own web of scheming. It is never easy to admit that one is wrong, but Emma does it admirably under the circumstances, for her emotions are very strong and are pulled in different directions.
The situation forces Emma to admit that her own imagination was wrong to go against the order of social stratification. Like the other characters, she has believed in it in general; but now the inequality of just one aberration from that order is forcefully impressed upon her. She sees that aberration—her own doing—as wrong and disruptive. She must deal with two misplaced prides—her own and Harriet's newly developed one. Basically what faces her is the necessity of helping or letting the social order reassert itself—if that can be.
