The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Chapter 4

“These are bunsen burners, this is a test-tube, this is a pipette, that’s a burette, that is a retort, a crucible...”

“These are bunsen burners, this is a test-tube, this is a pipette, that’s a burette, that is a retort, a crucible...”

Once, in later years, when Sandy was visited by Rose Stanley, and they fell to speaking of dead Mary Macgregor, Sandy said, “When any ill befalls me I wish I had been nicer to Mary.”

The Brodie set might easily have lost its identity at this time, not only because Miss Brodie had ceased to preside over their days which were now so brisk with the getting of knowledge from unsoulful experts, but also because the headmistress intended them to be dispersed.

“I see,” said Mary, taking the remark as an edict rather than a probing question.

“Ideas like ‘the team spirit’” she said, “ought not to be enjoined on the female sex, especially if they are of that dedicated nature whose virtues from time immemorial have been utterly opposed to the concept. Florence Nightingale knew nothing of the team spirit, her mission was to save life regardless of the team to which it belonged..."

“Ideas like ‘the team spirit’” she said, “ought not to be enjoined on the female sex, especially if they are of that dedicated nature whose virtues from time immemorial have been utterly opposed to the concept. Florence Nightingale knew nothing of the team spirit, her mission was to save life regardless of the team to which it belonged..."

Not one of the senior house-prefects personified an argument to touch Sybil Thorndike and Cleopatra.

Mr. Lloyd shouted at them in his hoarse voice to shut up. This was most bracing.

...it was now rather a question of plumbing the deep heart’s core.

She was surprised by a reawakening of that same buoyant and airy discovery of sex, a total sensation which it was impossible to say was physical or mental, only that it contained the lost and guileless delight of her eleventh year.

She was surprised by a reawakening of that same buoyant and airy discovery of sex, a total sensation which it was impossible to say was physical or mental, only that it contained the lost and guileless delight of her eleventh year.

“Mr. Lowther’s housekeeper,” said Miss Brodie one Saturday afternoon, “has left him. It is most ungrateful, that house at Cramond is easily run. I never cared for her as you know. I think she resented my position as Mr. Lowther’s friend and confidante, and seemed dissatisfied by my visits. Mr. Lowther is composing some music for song at the moment. He ought to be encouraged.”

“There is an old tradition for this practice,” said Miss Brodie. “Many families in the olden days could afford to send but one child to school, whereupon that one scholar of the family imparted to the others in the evening what he had learned in the morning..."

When, after the examinations at the end of the first term, she looked at the papers they had been set, she read some of the more vulnerable of the questions aloud with the greatest contempt...

...then Mary was established in the wrong again, being tortured with probing questions, and generally led on to confess to the mirth-shaken world her notion that Latin and shorthand were one.

...the gym teacher, a thin grey-haired little wire, showed them what to do and shouted each order in a broad Scots accent interspersed by her short cough, on account of which she was later sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland.

Living on the coast nearby, it was simple for them to go over turn by turn and see to Mr. Lowther after school hours, and prepare his supper and lay out provision for his breakfast; it was not only simple, it was enjoyable to be doing good, and it was also profitable in a genteel way.

She always went to church on Sunday mornings, she had a rota of different denominations and sects which included the Free Churches of Scotland, the Established Church of Scotland, the Methodist and the Episcopalian churches and any other church outside the Roman Catholic pale which she might discover.

She always went to church on Sunday mornings, she had a rota of different denominations and sects which included the Free Churches of Scotland, the Established Church of Scotland, the Methodist and the Episcopalian churches and any other church outside the Roman Catholic pale which she might discover.

She was not in any doubt, she let everyone know she was in no doubt, that God was on her side whatever her course, and so she experienced no difficulty or sense of hypocrisy...

The side-effects of this condition were exhilarating to her special girls in that they in some way partook of the general absolution she had assumed to herself, and it was only in retrospect that they could see Miss Brodie’s affair with Mr. Lowther for what it was, that is to say, in a factual light.

When it became certain that the Kerr sisters had taken over permanently the housekeeping for this bashful, smiling bachelor, Miss Brodie fancied he was getting thin.

Now Miss Brodie was saying: “Mr. Lowther is looking thin these days. I have no faith in those Kerr sisters, they are skimping him, they have got skimpy minds. The supplies of food they leave behind on Saturdays are barely sufficient to see him through Sunday, let alone the remainder of the week..."

It might have seemed an audacious proposition, but the girls did not think of it this way.

They heartily urged Miss Brodie to descend upon the Kerrs and to interfere, partly in anticipation of some eventful consequence, and partly because Mr. Lowther would somehow smile away any fuss; and the Kerr sisters were fairly craven; and above all, Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were only the squares on the other two sides.

They heartily urged Miss Brodie to descend upon the Kerrs and to interfere, partly in anticipation of some eventful consequence, and partly because Mr. Lowther would somehow smile away any fuss; and the Kerr sisters were fairly craven; and above all, Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were only the squares on the other two sides.

Meantime Miss Brodie set about feeding Mr. Lowther up, and, since this meant her passing Saturday afternoons at Cramond, the Brodie set was invited to go, two by two, one pair every week, to visit her in Mr. Lowther’s residence where he smiled and patted their hair or pulled pretty Jenny’s ringlets, looking meanwhile for reproof or approval, or some such thing, at brown-eyed Jean Brodie.

He died cheerfully on a gibbet of his own devising in seventeen-eighty-eight.

"...However all this may be, it is the stuff I am made of, and I have brooked and shall brook no nonsense from Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr.”

There were so many twists and turns in the wooded path leading up from the road, and the front lawn was so narrow, that the house could never be seen from the little distance that its size demanded and it was necessary to crane one’s neck upward to see the turret at all.

But he worked his way through everything with impassive obedience while she questioned the girls: “What are you doing in the art class just now?”

“The word ‘like’ is redundant in that sentence. What is Mrs. Lloyd’s Christian name?”

“She’s that brazen,” said Miss Gaunt.

All this was conveyed to Sandy by the headmistress herself at that subsequent time when Sandy looked at her distastefully through her little eyes and, evading the quite crude question which the coarse-faced woman asked her, was moved by various other considerations to betray Miss Brodie.