"Um," Jenny says brightly, "You could show them this dress!" Eleanor shrugs elaborately and is all, "GREAT IDEA, GENIUS! You're so pretty and funny and smart! I never would have thought of that! Give me the motherfucking dress." Jenny, thinking she's making a completely different deal than the one she's making, tries to negotiate an in with the buyers tomorrow, and Eleanor -- who knows how to play refrigerator mommy better than anybody, which is why Blair is broken -- gives her a totally conspiratorially and maternal smile. "Absolutely. When those buyers leave here, they will know the name Jenny Humphrey!" Jenny does a backflip and Eleanor switches back to her real actual scary self. "So, you are going to have to remake that dress. In my fabrics, of course," she says, sliding a bolt toward her. Jenny, patternless because she's this intuitive creative genius just waiting to pop, worries because that's not a lot of time to take her dress apart and make a new one, and Eleanor's gaze gets harder. "You expect me to reschedule Barney's and Bendel's?" Jenny slinks off. And you know what? No bad guy here. If I say "I am totally going to use you up and burn you out, okay?" And you say that's cool, then the asshole is you. I have to explain this to guys all the time, and it never ceases to amaze, but then, that's just another version of the game Chuck and Blair are playing, to wit:

Blair sits on Chuck's limo at some undefined UES time and location, in her cute earlier outfit: Humphrey Lesson One: Be Unavoidable & Unsubtle. He smiles hugely when he sees her, and she offers to go get a drink. "Want to say those three little words? Then no drink." She asks if his fear comes from a lack of self-control and crosses her legs, revealing sexy white garters and lace-topped stockings. She eyes him up, but he's mesmerized. He doesn't take his eyes off her for a moment as he leads her around the car and opens the door for her. "Spotted: Upper East Side beauty, laying down the gauntlet for her favorite beast. But careful, princess. It's gonna take more than a little leg to get this prince to ravish you..."

Which is totally correct, which just goes to show that Blair has actually been driven around the bend by this new Bass gambit, because this is the point -- the door opening, him acceding -- is when she should throw away the Humphrey Lessons, because this is the part that she knows. She's given in just that tiniest, tiddliest bit that Dan was right about, and now it's back to the game. But because she's at wit's end, she's going to stay on the Humphrey train and completely forget herself. All she needed was for somebody to write the story so she could put herself inside it, and Dan wrote a great first page, but that's where it should end. Blair's willpower has always been her greatest quality, obviously, but the thing that makes you awesome is always the thing that makes you suck so she bends it to making these -- as Gossip Girl keeps hammering this week -- fairytales come true and invariably they end up with not a whole lot of the original Blair ingredient that made the recipe so tasty in the first place. Watch, because in this episode Dan's always right but not completely right, and because she's Blair and throws herself into things like this, she overshoots it instead of tempering it with her own gorgeous brain. And all that means is that she's really in the wilderness. The thing about the Lessons, the Rules, is that they tell you what Men Are Like, but if you forget what You Are Like in the process, you'll always always lose, because not even Jenny Humphrey can be Jenny Humphrey 24/7.