A Parisian woman comes to visit the Basque country, and while at dinner with friends remarks that the Basque people have no art. Once she’s left, a friend asks the Basque schoolteacher who was with them why she didn’t disagree. The schoolteacher launches into the story of a young girl named Noemi, who was given up for adoption and taken in by a Basque farming family. She was too weak to do most of the farm work, so the family assigned her to watching the animals eat their feed, which slowed her development and made people at school believe she was dull-witted. One day, she develops a sore that begins to get infected, and the schoolteacher insists that she is taken to a hospital. When the schoolteacher goes to visit Noemi, she finds that another woman has already been there before her, and they had a strange altercation that ended in tears on both sides. The schoolteacher theorizes that the woman was Noemi’s birth mother, and waits for her to return so that she can confirm the truth. Meanwhile, Noemi has begun to thrive and develop normally while staying at the hospital. When the schoolteacher and mysterious woman finally meet, the latter confirms that Noemi is her daughter by a rich Parisian boy she worked for in her youth, and she was forced to give up her baby. Now she’s married to a successful Basque butcher and they have a daughter too, but she’s too ashamed to admit the secret to him, so she pretended to come visit her sister in order to see Noemi. The schoolteacher and woman make a plan for Noemi to move to the town where her sister lives so that her birth mother can visit her often, and once released from the hospital, the child flourishes in her new life. One day, the woman knocks on the schoolteacher’s door. She says that she was so anxious about keeping a secret from her husband, that he thought she was mad at him because she had found out his secret: Long before they met, he slept with a woman and she returned nine months later with a baby, claiming it was his and leaving it with him. He raised the daughter as his own. Overcome with relief, the woman also shares her own secret with her husband. This finally allowed the three daughters to come together and thrive together as a family. Having finished her story, the schoolteacher tells her friend that this love is the true Basque art, and someone from the city used to traditional art would not understand that.