'Like a country bumpkin'
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De certo; que ar espantado tem ella!.. parece uma matuta, que nunca pisou em um salão de baile; não acha, D. Rozalina?
Certainly; what a startled air she has!... she looks like a country girl who has never set foot in a ballroom; don't you think, Dona Rosalina?
The ladies pounce on Isaura's 'ar espantado', her startled air, and read it as rusticity — 'uma matuta', a backwoods girl who has never seen a ballroom. They are wrong about the cause and right about the fact: Isaura does look out of place, but not because she is a bumpkin. Her wariness, that flinching alertness, is the fugitive's, not the peasant's — the look of someone scanning a room for danger, not someone dazzled by chandeliers. The women, unable to imagine the real reason, reach for the nearest condescension. It is the mirror of the men's error: where the gentlemen romanticized her strangeness into celestial mystery, the ladies domesticate it into mere provincial gaucherie. Neither can read the truth written on her face, that she is frightened, and with reason.
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