Page:Brazilian short stories.djvu/62

 turned into dingy ruins. Dona Izaura bewailed her cakes, her butter and chickens. As for Zilda, the disaster had the effect of an icy blast across a tender flower in bloom. She took to her bed in a fever. Her face became hollow. All the tragic episodes in the novels she had read fled through her memory; she saw in herself the victim of them all. And for days contemplated suicide. Finally she became used to the idea and continued to live. Thus she verified the fact that folks die of love only in fiction. …

The story ends here—for the audience; for the gallery it still goes on a bit. The audience is accustomed to simulate some fine habits of good taste and tone, which are very laughable; it enters the theatre after the play has begun, and leaves when the epilogue has hardly commenced. Now the galleries want the whole thing so as to have their full money's worth to the last penny. In the novels and stories they ask insistently for all the details of the plot and if the author, led by the teaching of his school, presents them with the half finished sentence which he calls the impressionable note, at the most exciting point, they turn up their noses. They want to know and they are perfectly right, if So-and-so died, if the girl married happily, if the man finally sold the fazenda. To whom and for how much.

Healthy, human and highly respectable curiosity!

"Did poor Moreira sell the fazenda?"

I am sorry to say that he did not! And he did not sell it due to the most unconceivable