The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

appearance of an ellipse by holding up a saucer in his one right hand, high above his head, then lower. But his romantic air and his hoarse “Shut up” had produced a reaction of giggles varying in tone and pitch.
    “If you girls don’t shut up I’ll smash this saucer to the floor,” he said.
    They tried but failed to shut up.
    He smashed the saucer to the floor.
    Amid the dead silence which followed he picked on Rose Stanley and indicating the fragments of saucer on the floor, he said, “You with the profile—pick this up.”
    He turned away and went and did something else at the other end of the long room for the rest of the period, while the girls looked anew at Rose Stanley’s profile, marvelled at Mr. Lloyd’s style, and settled down to drawing a bottle set up in front of a curtain. Jenny remarked to Sandy that Miss Brodie really had good taste.
    “He has an artistic temperament, of course,” said Miss Brodie when she was told about the saucer. And when she heard that he had called Rose “you with the profile,” she looked at Rose in a special way, while Sandy looked at Miss Brodie.
    The interest of Sandy and Jenny in Miss Brodie’s lovers had entered a new phase since they had buried their last composition and moved up to the Senior school. They no longer saw everything in a sexual context, it was now rather a question of plumbing the deep heart’s core. The world of pure sex seemed years away. Jenny had turned twelve. Her mother had recently given birth to a baby boy, and the event had not moved them even to speculate upon its origin.
    “There’s not much time for sex research in the Senior school,” Sandy said.
    “I feel I’m past it,” said Jenny. This was strangely true, and she did not again experience her early sense of erotic wonder in life until suddenly one day when she was nearly forty, an actress of moderate reputation married to a theatrical manager. It happened she was standing with a man whom she did not know very well outside a famous building in Rome, waiting for the rain to stop. 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 supposed herself to have fallen in love with the man, who might, she thought, have been moved towards her in his own way out of a world of his own, the associations of which were largely unknown to her. There was nothing whatever to be done about it, for Jenny had been contentedly married for sixteen years past; but the concise happening filled her with astonishment whenever it came to mind in later days, and with a sense of the hidden possibilities in all things.
    “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.”
    The next Saturday she told the girls that the sewing sisters, Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr, had taken on the temporary task of housekeepers to Mr. Lowther, since they lived near Cramond.
    “I think those sisters are inquisitive,” Miss Brodie remarked. “They are too much in with Miss Gaunt and the Church of Scotland.”
    On Saturday afternoons an hour was spent on her Greek lessons, for she had insisted that Jenny and Sandy should teach her Greek at the same time as they learned it. “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. I have long wanted to know the Greek language, and this scheme will also serve to