[Here’s an excerpt from THE RELIC (Ch. 1) by José Maria de Eça de Queirós, translated by Aubrey F.G. Bell:]
. . . For Aunt Patrocinio all human action outside the doors of the churches consisted in running after men or running after women, and to her both these pleasant natural impulses were equally odious.
This old maid, withered as a vine-twig, whose livid skin had only been touched by the grey paternal moustache of [her relative] Comendador Godinho, and who muttered incessantly melancholy prayers of divine love before the naked Christ, had gradually become permeated with an envious bitter rancor towards every form and charm of human love. It was not enough for her to condemn love as a thing profane: Dona Patrocinio das Neves made a gesture of disgust and brushed it aside as so much dirt. A serious young man seriously in love was vile in her sight; and if she heard that a lady had had a child she would mutter: How disgusting.
She almost considered Nature obscene for having crated two sexes. Rich and fond of comfort, she would never have a manservant in the house, so that the two sexes should not meet in kitchen and passage; and although [her servant] Vicencia’s hair was turning white and the cook was a stammering decrepit old woman and the other servant, Eusebia, a toothless crone, she was always fumbling desperately among their trunks and even in the straw of their mattresses to see if she could discover a photograph of a man, a letter of a man, any trace or smell of man.