God forgive her: And she was his mother

In the centre of the engraving, a young woman holds a half-open fan in one of her hands and gazes at it with a haughty gesture. Next to her is a female figure who is covered, with only the top of her head uncovered. The young woman does not seem to recognise the woman who has approached her.

The engraving has been briefly described in the surviving manuscripts of the Caprices series. In the Ayala manuscript it is said that "there are daughters who do not even know their mothers, who go about begging for alms". The manuscript in the Prado Museum explains that "she won the lottery. She goes down to the Prado, hears a filthy, decrepit old woman begging for alms, she bids her farewell; the old woman urges her to turn around and finds - who would have thought it - that the poor woman is her mother". Lastly, reference should be made to the manuscript in the National Library, which states that "a vicious daughter who becomes a whore does not even know her mother, who is perhaps begging for alms".

This engraving criticises a circumstance that frequently occurred in the society of the time, that of those young women who, thanks to prostitution, were able to leave the environments they came from and achieve a more comfortable economic situation. In some cases, they seemed to have forgotten their origins, as in the present engraving in which the young woman does not realise that it is her own mother who approaches her to beg for alms.

Some specialists, including Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, believe that the woman who approaches the young woman could be a procuress, as in certain cases prostitutes called them "mother".