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O assumpto da palestra era também D. Elvira; mas o diapasão era totalmente diverso, e em nada se harmonizava com o da conversação dos rapazes. Nenhum mal nos fará escutal-as por alguns instantes.
The subject of their talk was also Dona Elvira; but the pitch was entirely different, and in no way harmonized with that of the young men's conversation. It will do us no harm to listen to them for a few moments.
The narrator makes the structural joke explicit with a musical metaphor: the women discuss the same subject, but in a different 'diapasão', a different pitch or key, which 'em nada se harmonizava' with the men's. Guimarády, fond of theatrical and musical framing, invites us once more to eavesdrop — 'nenhum mal nos fará escutal-as' — with the same tour-guide gesture that opened the chapter. The device is deliberate symmetry: two choruses, male and female, singing the same name in opposite modes, and the reader placed to hear both. What follows will be the chapter's darkest comedy, the envy of women toward a rival beauty, and it will circle, cruelly and unknowingly, around the very mark that is Isaura's secret danger. The men adored the disguise; the women, we are about to see, will pick at it.
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