It was Virgília, the woman who runs through Brás Cubas's life from the beginning to the end of the book. Brás calls her "the great sin of youth", and, on seeing her again in his illness, says: "Of two great lovers, of two unbridled passions, nothing more remained there, twenty years later". She is the only one of whom he speaks of unbridled passions, although the text never uses the expression "great love".
Virgília is the fiancée his father chooses for him, daughter of Counselor Dutra, "a political influence". When Lobo Neves appears, she asks him whether he will make her a baroness, and he answers that he will make her a marchioness, because he will be a marquis. Years later she returns married to him, and it is during a waltz that the affair with Brás begins. She refuses to run away and accepts the little house in Gamboa, because in her spirit love and public esteem are linked. When her husband is appointed provincial president, the couple sails.
The others fall short. Marcela, the Spanish woman with whom he falls in love at seventeen, is his first liaison, and his tally is dry: she loved him "for fifteen months and eleven contos de réis". Eugênia, the lame girl from Tijuca, awakens in him pity and the "terror of coming to love truly, and marry her"; it is she who says: "You do well to flee the ridicule of marrying me." Nhã-loló, chosen by his sister for him to marry, dies of yellow fever before the wedding, and Brás concludes that "perhaps I did not truly love her".
All of this comes from Brás: the book never enters Virgília's mind, and each of her scenes admits two readings, that of the woman who calculates and that of the woman who suffers without being able to say so.