"She would not go to the funeral, for that is what she had promised her lover, although Dr. Urbino thought he had just read the opposite in one of the paragraphs of the letter. She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory, she would not bury herself alive inside these four walls to sew her shroud, as native widows were expected to do."