The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Chapters 5–6

“Well, what about Red Velvet? Show Sandy that—Teddy did a splendid portrait of Rose last summer, we swathed her in red velvet, and we’ve called it Red Velvet.”

“I’ve done one or two preliminary sketches. Don’t you think that setting’s rather good for Monica? Here’s one of Eunice in her harlequin outfit, I thought she looked rather well in it.”

Teddy Lloyd’s method of presentation was similar, it was economical, and it always seemed afterwards to Sandy that where there was a choice of various courses, the most economical was the best, and that the course to be taken was the most expedient and most suitable at the time for all the objects in hand.

She looked back just as closely through her little eyes, with the near-blackmailing insolence of her knowledge.

The eldest boy, who was eight, turned on the wireless and began to sing in mincing English tones, “Oh play to me, Gipsy” to the accompaniment of Henry Hall’s band.

The other three children were making various kinds of din.

“Why?” said Deirdre, not that it seemed to matter, she was so languid and long-armed, lifting the plate of biscuits from the table and passing them round without moving from the low stool on which she sat.

He fell into a melancholy mood upon his retirement from the offices of choir-master and Elder, and the girls thought he brooded often upon the possibility that Miss Brodie could not take to his short legs, and was all the time pining for Teddy Lloyd’s long ones.

Almost shrewdly, Miss Brodie fixed on Sandy, and even then it was not of her own affairs that she spoke.

“All my ambitions,” said Miss Brodie, “are fixed on yourself and Rose. You will not speak of this to the other girls, it would cause envy. I had hopes of Jenny, she is so pretty; but Jenny has become insipid, don’t you think?”

She was a little pathetic. But she’s really a most irritating girl, I’d rather deal with a rogue than a fool.

“—that’s why she has a bad temper, she understands nothing but signs and symbols and calculations. Nothing infuriates people more than their own lack of spiritual insight, Sandy, that is why the Moslems are so placid, they are full of spiritual insight..."

I thought that very profound, I felt humbled.

I thought that very profound, I felt humbled.

"...He had true dignity. Sandy, you will never get anywhere by hunching over your putter, hold your shoulders back and bend from the waist. He was a very splendid person with a great sense of his bearing.”

They are all gross materialists, these women in the Senior school, they all belong to the Fabian Society and are pacifists.

In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived, or rather a specified recognition of it. She desired this birthright; something definite to reject. It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged.

In this oblique way, she began to sense what went to the makings of Miss Brodie who had elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn’t stand it any more.

Teddy Lloyd’s passion for Jean Brodie was greatly in evidence in all the portraits he did of the various members of the Brodie set. He did them in a group during one summer term, wearing their panama hats each in a different way, each hat adorning, in a magical transfiguration, a different Jean Brodie under the forms of Rose, Sandy, Jenny, Mary, Monica and Eunice.

Nominally, they were members of Holyrood, Melrose, Argyll and Biggar, but it had been well known that the Brodie set had no team spirit and did not care which house won the shield.

In her frustration she sometimes took reprisals against them when she could do so under the guise of fair play, which was not often.

In her frustration she sometimes took reprisals against them when she could do so under the guise of fair play, which was not often.

“If they do not try to unseat me on the grounds of my educational policy, they attempt personal calumny,” said Miss Brodie one day.

Miss Brodie was greatly taken aback and suffered untimely, for a space, from a sense of having been betrayed.

Miss Brodie was greatly taken aback and suffered untimely, for a space, from a sense of having been betrayed.

When they conferred amongst themselves on the subject they had to admit, at last, and without doubt, that she was really an exciting woman as a woman.

She insisted on calling herself Joyce Emily, was brought to school in the morning by a chauffeur in a large black car, though she was obliged to make her own way home; she lived in a huge house with a stables in the near environs of Edinburgh.

She thought him rather carnal.

When she was a nun, sooner or later one and the other of the Brodie set came to visit Sandy, because it was something to do, and she had written her book of psychology, and everyone likes to visit a nun, it provides a spiritual sensation, a catharsis to go home with, especially if the nun clutches the bars of the grille.

“Then it was a real renunciation in a way,” said Monica.

By the end of the year it happened that she had quite lost interest in the man himself, but was deeply absorbed in his mind, from which she extracted, among other things, his religion as a pith from a husk.

Presently she was exultant, and presently again enquired for details, which she did not get.

“Because it is still going on, I mean class after class, and now she has formed a new set, and they are so out of key with the rest of the school, Miss Brodie’s set. They are precocious. Do you know what I mean?”

Perhaps Mary had nursed a grievance, in her stupidity of mind, against me—she is such an exasperating young woman.

Sandy replied like an enigmatic Pope: “If you did not betray us it is impossible that you could have been betrayed by us. The word betrayed does not apply...”