Virgília is the woman who runs through Brás Cubas's life: the fiancée his father chooses for him, the wife of Lobo Neves, the lover of the little house in Gamboa, and the visitor who finds him ill at the beginning of the book. Brás calls her "the great sin of youth".
His father chooses her as a fiancée and as a route to a candidacy for deputy, since she is the daughter of Counselor Dutra, "a political influence". When Lobo Neves appears, Virgília asks him when he will be minister and whether he will make her a baroness, and he answers that he will make her a marchioness. She picks the eagle and leaves the peacock. Years later she returns from São Paulo married to Lobo Neves, and it is during a waltz that the affair with Brás begins.
Virgília refuses to run away with him and accepts the little house, because in her mind love and public esteem are linked. She becomes pregnant and loses the child; faced with the anonymous letter that denounces the affair, she calls the denunciation slander in front of her husband and tells Brás everything with a calm that unsettles him. When her husband is appointed provincial president, the couple sails. Widowed, she mourns Lobo Neves with sincerity, and Brás, who on the return trip cannot reconcile the betrayal with the weeping, ends up finding the combination possible, even easy.
The book never enters Virgília's mind: everything known about her comes from Brás. That is why almost every scene admits two readings, that of the woman who calculates and that of the woman who suffers without being able to say so, and the text sustains both.