Dom Casmurro 3.49 · 3.49

'A familia Padua perdeu tanta cousa' — the Pádua family lost so much. The detail does two things at once. It grounds the neighbourliness in compassion — the Santiagos drew close to a family struck by disaster — and it quietly marks the class gap José Dias exploited: the Páduas are the poorer house, the one that had things to lose and lost them. Dona Glória raises their misfortune as a reason for tenderness; the reader can feel, underneath, how the same fact could be turned, in a colder mouth, into the motive José Dias imputed.

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