And, once more burying his nose in the book, he carried on with his reading. Caetaninha discussed the matter with the house-slaves, who told her they had suspected for some time that he wasn’t well. You can imagine the young lady’s fears, but her fear soon passed, leaving only pity, which merely made her feel still fonder of him. Also, his mania was harmless enough, for it extended only to books. Fulgêncio lived for the written word, the printed word, the doctrinal and the abstract, for principles and formulas. Over time, he reached the point of theoretical hallucination, although not yet superstition. One of his maxims was that freedom would not die as long as there remained one piece of paper on which to declare it. One day, waking up with the idea of improving the condition of the Turks, he drafted a constitution and sent it to the British envoy in Petrópolis, as a gift. On another occasion, he applied himself to studying the anatomy of the eyes, to see if they really could see, and concluded that they could.

Tell me how, under such conditions, Caetaninha’s life could possibly be happy? It’s true that she wanted for nothing, because her godfather was a rich man. It was he himself who had brought her up from the age of seven, when he lost his wife; he taught her reading and writing, then French, a little history and geography (which is tantamount to saying almost nothing), and charged one of the house-slaves with teaching her embroidery, lace-making, and sewing. So much is true. But Caetaninha was now fourteen, and, if toys and slaves had once been enough to amuse her, she was reaching the age when toys lose their appeal and slaves their interest, and when no amount of reading and writing can make a paradise of a secluded house up in Tijuca. She sometimes went down to the city, but these were rare occasions, and always very rushed; she didn’t visit the theater or go to dances, and she neither made nor received visits. Whenever she saw a riding party of ladies and gentlemen pass by on the road, her soul would jump up behind one of the riders, while her body stayed put by the side of her godfather, who carried on reading.

One day, when she was in the garden, she saw a young man stop at the front gate. He was riding a small mule, and he asked if this was Senhor Fulgêncio’s house.

“Indeed it is, sir.”

“May I speak with him?”

Caetaninha replied that she would go and see; she entered the house and went to the study, where she found her godfather ruminating over a chapter of Hegel with the most devoutly voluptuous expression on his face. “A young man? What young man?” Caetaninha told him that it was a young man dressed in mourning.