I have already prayed Saint Inez
Not to let this month pass,
And Saint Mariana,
That it may be this week—
And I beg the Virgin Our Lady
That it may be this very hour!
From which it will be seen that the saints are expected to be useful, and that festas of the church are agreeable to these young people, leading in the older centres a rather restricted social life.
Women in Brazil occupy a position out of which they have been forced or have voluntarily emerged in many countries. It is for many reasons a very happy life, for, withdrawn as she is, the Brazilian wife and mother has complete authority over the wide sphere which tradition has so long assigned to her. It is a moot point whether women in other lands would seek emergence from that circle if circumstances did not send them from it; the salary-earning women of Western Europe and North America perhaps do not always realize that theirs is not altogether a choice between home and independence, that they work because they must work. The exigencies of climate, as well as modern education, send women out to the ranks of the workers in lands where there are at least as many women as men.
In Brazil there is no such equality of numbers. The list of men is always much longer than that of women, chiefly because of the stream of male immigrants who arrive in the country without families, and, earning good wages, set about the acquisition of a home. The predominant classes of such immigrants are Portuguese, and these men, speaking the same language and with close affiliations to Brazil, readily seek wives among the Brazilian families to which their status gives them entry. Little social adjustment is needed in such unions, much less than in the case of the marriage of Brazilian girls with foreigners of a totally divergent origin.
The Brazilian girl is said to be precocious, and she is certainly the possessor of tactful manners and distinct aplomb in her early teens. If she is a member of a wealthy family she has generally spent some years in French schools, and it is not unusual to find beautiful young women of nineteen or so who have been educated in Germany, France, Switzerland and England, and who speak four or five languages fluently. All educated Brazilians speak and read French, most of them understand but will not speak English, and nearly all those from the more southerly parts of Brazil have learned German for commercial reasons or have been partly educated in Germany. Educational affiliations with the United States are new, and apply to young men more than to girls; technical training in engineering or trading is sought increasingly in North America for business reasons as commercial exchange develops, but the closely guarded, often conventual training of the girls has a very different aim. The young Brazilian girl is frequently a good horsewoman, for life on a farm is almost sure to be included in the tale of her early years; she is often also a good swimmer. Music is an invariable part of her education on which stress is laid, and I have heard some brilliant executants among Brazilian women. Dressed in the height of Parisian fashions, chic, demure outside her family and full of gay camaraderie with her endless lines of brothers and sisters inside the home, the Brazilian young girl is a very charming creature. She has the loveliest dark eyes in the world, and often possesses a very fine clear pale skin.