In decorating the parlors, the customary symmetry was scrupulously respected. Julia’s tiniest alteration was corrected by Idolina as an intolerable sin against orthodoxy. La Alazana accepted the corrections obediently. Without a frame of conventionality to set her off, how would she be able to perform convincingly in her role as a Coleta lady?

On the day of the first reception, Julia was almost unable to enjoy her triumph. At one moment she was spying on the approving or critical reactions of her guests, at the next she was following the efficiency of the service with a vigilant gaze. Her worries didn’t subside until the ritual had acquired the natural fluidity of an everyday occurrence. Only then did she notice that her guests were behaving in a way that, under other circumstances, she would have described as insulting.

Far from being grateful for Julia’s hospitality, they reciprocated with small but not inoffensive acts of hostility.

The assiduity bordering on mania with which Julia kept her house clean was her first vulnerable point. The guests appeared not to have noticed the mats placed in the entryways, or to be unaware of the use for which they were intended, and they came into the house with shoes that were filthy with mud from the street.

Distracted by their state of distress, they kept a clumsy hold on the glasses of refreshments, the cups of coffee or chocolate with which Julia plied them, and the liquids splashed across the furniture, leaving obscene stains on the carpets.

A simple exclamation of annoyance, not apology, would bring an end to such an incident, which wouldn’t even cause a break in conversations from which the lady of the house was excluded because no one had filled her in on the story or instructed her on the meaning of the local idioms or asked her whether or not she was interested.

When Julia sought to breach the circle of exclusion by venturing a question, she received a vague or impatient answer, as if her curiosity were neither appropriate nor justified.

As time passed, the abuses—which the visitors called informalities—grew more flagrant. Each guest began to make known her favorite foods. The maids hurriedly offered them pieces of cheese, pork sausage, little cakes. Some of them, once their own appetite was sated, did not blush to ask for a napkin to wrap more food up. It was “a little something to tide over” the sick child, the invalid grandfather, the man preoccupied by war. La Alazana heaped more on to what the visitor had already been given and made an exaggerated show of refusing to listen to her explanations.

Her extravagance earned her no gratitude, only suspicion. What was she going to want from those ladies in exchange for what she gave them? They kept themselves at the ready to respond to the first hint in the negative, but meanwhile they were able to save their own food supplies by eating hers.