Eugênia is the sixteen-year-old girl whom Brás Cubas meets in Tijuca, daughter of Dona Eusébia, pretty and lame from birth. She is the woman Brás kisses and leaves, and the one who, years later, looks at him with dignity in a tenement.
When Brás asks her whether she hurt her foot, she answers without hesitation: "No, sir, I am lame from birth." Brás is confused by what he sees: "Why pretty, if lame? why lame, if pretty?" He takes her for an illegitimate daughter, made of love and scorn, and, after she says "Don't come down" and gives him the first kiss, he admires the art with which she disguises herself when her mother enters, and calls it hypocrisy. Even so, he comes down: what decides him is the pity that her candor inspires in him and the terror of truly loving a lame woman and marrying her. The phrase he had in his head is said by Eugênia herself: "You do well to flee the ridicule of marrying me."
Brás comes to imagine her lonely, silent and hardworking, an image he built himself. When he finds her again in a tenement, where he goes to distribute alms, "She lifted her head at once, and looked at me with great dignity". The look is enough to refuse the money, and Brás extends his hand to her as to a lady. He does not ask what happened to her, and the book never says what Eugênia thinks of him.