showing off????

then ten ten

When I read paragraph 17, I found a question. The author used dashes several times. Did the author wanted to emphasize or explain with these dashes every time? I have no idea. I think in the first sentence of this paragraph, the two dashes were standing side by side to emphasize the words “if we'd been the luck lady”; then the author gave us an situation what we would do after this sentence. I think this kind of stricture about writing was worth learning for us.
In the second sentence, the author said: “I'll lay my cards right on the table….” I did not understand the meaning, because the author did not say what were the cards, where were they from? So I read it time to time, finally I found the answer. Exactly the author wanted to tell us something about how did she showing off before. But why the author told us this? In my view, the author wanted to prove her opinion - everyone has some need to showing off.
In paragraph 18, just had one sentence. The author used two dashes to emphasize again. It was the author' s conclusion.