“It is only for this once.”
Her sadness went on increasing. She took refuge in Jorge’s affection as her sole consolation. At night she could breathe; Juliana was asleep; she did not see her sour countenance, she was not obliged to praise her, she was not doing her work for her. Then she was herself,—the Luiza of former times. She was safe in her own room, her husband beside her, free! She could live, laugh, talk; she even had an appetite. And in fact she sometimes took bread and preserves to her room to eat before going to bed.
All this aroused Jorge’s wonder. “You are another person in the evening,” he would say to her; and he called her a “night-bird.”
But what an awakening in the morning! Existence then weighed heavy upon her. She dressed herself with repugnance, entering upon the new day as on a state of bondage. She lost the hope of recovering her liberty. At times the thought of confessing everything to Sebastião passed through her mind like a flash of lightning. But when she saw him, with his honest glance, embracing Jorge, and going off with him to his study to smoke, it seemed to her easier to go out into the street and ask money from the first passer-by than to go to Sebastião and say to him, “I wrote a man a letter which the servant stole from me.” No! Rather die with this daily agony, rather scrub the steps, than this. At times she thought, “But what am I hoping for?” She did not know,—some unforeseen occurrence, or the death of Juliana. And she went on living, enjoying as a favor each new day’s exemption from disgrace, and beholding vaguely in the distance a dark and fathomless abyss into which she would end by sinking.
At this time Jorge began to complain that his shirts were badly ironed. Juliana was positively getting spoiled. One day he grew angry, and crumpling up his shirt, called her, and threw it on the floor at her feet.
“This sort of thing cannot continue,” he said; “it is disgraceful.”
Juliana grew livid, and fixed on Luiza a glance that burned into her soul; but she began to make excuses with trembling lips. The starch was vile, and it must be changed.
No sooner had Jorge gone away than Juliana swept into Luiza’s room like a whirlwind, closed the door behind her, and began to cry out that the mistress soiled a heap of clothes, the master a heap of shirts, and that without assistance she could not do so much work. “Whoever wants slaves must go to Brazil for them,” she ended. “And I am in no humor to put up with the ill-temper of your husband, do you understand, Senhora? If there is so much put upon me to do I must have help.”
Luiza answered simply, “I will help you.”
She attained at last to a state of resignation sombre and silent. She accepted everything. At the end of the week there was an accumulation of soiled clothes, and Juliana said that if the mistress would iron she would starch, otherwise she would not. The day was a fine one, and Luiza had intended to go out. She laid aside her gown, and without a word went and took up the iron.