Stratis first ate the wedding sugared almonds and then saw her. The wedding favors were waiting for them in Piraeus. The office man carried them onto the ship, inside a large package tied with a golden ribbon. "Mrs. Teresa certainly knows how to do things in a grand manner," commented Markos, their cook. He was the only one who liked the captain's wife. Even those who had never seen her spoke ill of her for being snobbish and conceited. You see, she came from a great family. The Sommaripa were once prominent lords in Naxos, but when Giannis Perselis knocked on their castle door and asked for the hand of their only daughter, the rooms of the former tower were full of dampness and pieces of plaster were falling from the painted ceilings.

Teresa said yes but never admitted her husband as her equal. In the house she made him buy for her in Ermoupoli, she brought and affixed above the door the marble coat of arms of the Sommaripa, a lion holding a scepter in its paws. It made no sense to leave it in her ancestral home. Two years after her wedding, her father, in a brave decision that cost him the disapproval of the women in the family – wife, daughter, and an unmarried sister – sold the ruined mansion to the State to house some services of the Prefecture. "What do you want? To wait until the stones fall and crush us?" was his reasonable argument, which, however, only he seemed to admit.