Sofia is Cristiano Palha's wife and the object of Rubião's desire. She enters the scene on the train, silent, twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and at the end inaugurates the salons of the Botafogo mansion with a ball, wearing a necklace that had been one of Rubião's first gifts.
The daughter of an elderly civil servant, she married Palha at twenty; he has her dresses cut low whenever he can, to display her. The narrator says that she came to enjoy being looked at, that her eyes were "inviting, and only inviting," like the lantern of an inn with no rooms for guests, and that the door of her heart "was locked and double-locked."
In the garden of Santa Teresa, Rubião compares her eyes to stars, and the narrator says that he proposed to buy her soul and body. He holds her hand and asks her to gaze at the Southern Cross at ten at night; she begs: "Oh, don't break my fingers!" That night she tells everything to her husband, and Palha, after turning pale and minimizing it, confesses: "But, my dear, I owe you a great deal of money." Later Carlos Maria tells her, at a ball, that he spent an hour between the sea and her house, which, according to the narrator, was not true, and the phrase returns to Sofia's memory like "a stubborn musical phrase."
When Rubião enters her coupé uninvited and begins to rave there, Sofia feels aversion and fear of scandal, and then a compassion mixed with sympathy and selfishness. With him committed, she avoids visiting him. In the prologue, Machado refuses to continue the book with Sofia in a third part: "Sofia is all here."