Pombinha is the most beloved young woman in the tenement, daughter of Dona Isabel, who writes the letters and keeps the accounts of the neighbors, and whom the book follows from life in the tenement, to a broken engagement, to life with the courtesan Léonie.
The narrator introduces her on the tenement's morning: "The daughter was the flower of the tenement. They called her Pombinha", blonde, pale, sickly, "with the manners of a girl from a good family". She is the one who writes the letters, keeps the list of the laundresses, does the sums and reads the newspaper to anyone who wants it. Her mother, a widow of a hat-shop owner who went bankrupt, agrees to marry her only to the fiancé, João da Costa, once the girl stops being a child, even knowing that the marriage would take them out of the tenement.
On the Sunday of the feast for Miranda's title, Pombinha spends the afternoon with her mother at Léonie's house and comes back silent, carrying "impressions of intimate humiliations that would never be erased for the rest of her life". Two days later, in the grass behind the tenement, what her mother had hoped for happens, and the wedding is set. When Bruno asks her to write to Leocádia, she sees for the first time what the letters were hiding, and she does not break the engagement only because of her mother.
After two years of marriage, she does everything to be the wife her husband wants, slips into the arms of a bohemian poet and then of an actor, is abandoned, goes to live with Léonie and becomes a courtesan, supporting her mother until her death. The book does not decide whether it was the environment that led her there or a woman tired of pretending she had chosen another life. On her visits to the tenement, she protects Piedade's daughter.