The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Chapter 3

But she was not out of place amongst her own kind, the vigorous daughters of dead or enfeebled merchants, of ministers of religion, University professors, doctors, big warehouse owners of the past, or the owners of fisheries who had endowed these daughters with shrewd wits, high-coloured cheeks, constitutions like horses, logical educations, hearty spirits and private means.

Inwardly was a different matter, and it remained to be seen, towards what extremities her nature worked her.

...it was a crowded year of stirring revelations.

In Rome I saw the Forum and I saw the Colosseum where the gladiators died and the slaves were thrown to the lions. A vulgar American remarked to me, ‘It looks like a mighty fine quarry.’

One should have an innate sense of these things.

It was a sublime moment in a sublime love.

Come autumn sae pensive, in yellow and gray,
And soothe me wi’ tidings o’ nature’s decay

Come autumn sae pensive, in yellow and gray,
And soothe me wi’ tidings o’ nature’s decay

“We are now well into the nineteen-thirties. I have four pounds of rosy apples in my desk, a gift from Mr. Lowther’s orchard, let us eat them now while the coast is clear—not but what the apples do not come under my own jurisdiction, but discretion is...discretion is...Sandy?”

The teaching staff of the Senior school was indifferent or mildly amused, for they had not yet felt the impact of the Brodie set; that was to come the following year, and even then these Senior mistresses were not unduly irritated by the effects of what they called Miss Brodie’s experimental methods.

It was in the Junior school, among the lesser paid and lesser qualified women, with whom Miss Brodie had daily dealings, that indignation seethed.

It was the Brodie set who discerned, before she did, and certainly these men did, that Mr. Lowther and Mr. Lloyd were at pains to appear well, each in his exclusive right before Miss Brodie.

They had been marched into the art room by Miss Brodie, who was going to sit with the girls on the end of a bench, when the art master came forward with a chair for her held in his one hand and presented in a special way with a tiny inflection of the knees, like a flunkey.

They had been marched into the art room by Miss Brodie, who was going to sit with the girls on the end of a bench, when the art master came forward with a chair for her held in his one hand and presented in a special way with a tiny inflection of the knees, like a flunkey.

They kept their mouths shut tight against these convulsions, but the tighter their lips, the more did the little gusts of humour escape through their noses.

The girls, anxious to be of cultured and sexless antecedents, were instantly composed by the shock of this remark.

My love for Teddy was an obsession, he was the love of my prime. But in the autumn of nineteen-thirty-one I entered an affair with Gordon Lowther, he was a bachelor and it was more becoming.

Monica, whose face was becoming very red, swung the attache case which held her books, so that it hit the girls who stood in its path and made them stand back from her.

“I don’t believe what she says,” said Sandy, desperately trying to visualise the scene in the art room and to goad factual Monica into describing it with due feeling.

Miss Brodie came up behind her on her fourth performance which had reached a state of extreme flourish.

Miss Brodie’s reply was more anglicised in its accent than was its usual proud wont.

They looked out of the wide windows at the little Braid Burn trickling through the fields and at the hills beyond, so austere from everlasting that they had never been capable of losing anything by the war.

The Brodie set stuck together and were placed with a gaunt woman who was, in fact, a Miss Gaunt from the Western Isles who wore a knee-length skirt made from what looked like grey blanket stuff; this had never been smart even in the knee-length days; Rose Stanley said it was cut short for economy.

Her chest was a slight bulge flattened by a bust bodice, and her jersey was a dark forbidding green.

But the absence of Miss Brodie and the presence of Miss Gaunt had a definite subtracting effect from the sexual significance of everything, and the trepidation of the two sewing sisters contributed to the effect of grim realism.

Miss Gaunt evidently went to the same parish church as the Kerr sisters, to whom she addressed remarks from time to time while she embroidered a tray cloth.

For this reason she was more reticent than Jenny about the details of the imagined love affair.

“Of course the liaison was suspected. Perhaps you girls knew about it. You, Sandy, had a faint idea...but nobody could prove what was between Gordon Lowther and myself. It was never proved. It was not on those grounds that I was betrayed..."

Miss Brodie now played the accompaniment, sitting very well at the piano and sometimes, with a certain sadness of countenance, richly taking the second soprano in “How sweet is the shepherd’s sweet lot,” and other melodious preparations for the annual concert.

Eunice, preparing arduously for Confirmation, was still a bit too pious for Miss Brodie’s liking.

Eunice, preparing arduously for Confirmation, was still a bit too pious for Miss Brodie’s liking.

“Social what?” said Miss Brodie, who always made difficulties about words when she scented heresy.

She seemed despondent on hearing this.

Having perceived the truth, she escaped unharmed and unpursued though breathless, and was presently surrounded by solicitous, horrified relations and was coaxed to sip tea well sugared against the shock.

The first effect on Sandy was an adverse one, for she had been on the point of obtaining permission to go for walks alone in just such isolated spots as that in which Jenny’s encounter had taken place.

“Willis was remanded in custody...”

She did not exhort or bicker and even when hard pressed was irritable only with Mary Macgregor.

They placed Miss Brodie on the lofty lion’s back of Arthur’s Seat, with only the sky for roof and bracken for a bed.

“She gave herself to him,” Jenny said, “although she would fain have given herself to another.”

If I am in a certain condition I shall place the infant in the care of a worthy shepherd and his wife, and we can discuss it calmly as platonic acquaintances.