Forgetting the hard benches of the Academy
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e aos meigos olhares e angelicos sorrisos das bellas e espirituosas pernambucanas, esquecerem por algumas horas os duros bancos da Academia e os carunchosos praxistas.
and, in the gentle glances and angelic smiles of the beautiful and witty women of Pernambuco, to forget for a few hours the hard benches of the Academy and the worm-eaten commentators.
The joke lands on the students' law books: they come to the ball to forget 'os carunchosos praxistas' — the worm-eaten praxistas, the old writers of legal 'praxe', procedural manuals, dry as dust and half eaten by bookworms. 'Carunchoso', worm-eaten, is affectionate mockery of the dead weight of legal education. Guimarães sets the living warmth of the ballroom — 'meigos olhares e angelicos sorrisos', gentle looks and angelic smiles — against the sterile study of law, and the contrast has a sly edge for this book: the law these young men study is the same law that makes Isaura property. The novel will pit the letter of that law against the heart, and here, lightly, it already sides with the smiles over the statutes.
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