Dom Casmurro 21.21 · 21.21

Justina grants the boy his generality and immediately steps past it. 'Sim, é bonita; mas...' — the concession is only a pivot; the 'but' does all the work. She has caught the evasion and will not let it stand, redirecting from the abstract loveliness of the life to the concrete question of his will.

Here the sharp-eyed cousin proves her use. Where Dona Glória's world moves in vows and pieties, Justina insists on the plain point: not is the priesthood lovely, but do you want it. Her frankness, so unsettling a page ago, becomes a kind of clarity, the one voice in the house pressing Bentinho toward the truth about himself — a truth he is not yet ready, or able, to speak.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I