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were other people’s Edinburghs quite different from hers, and with which she held only the names of districts and streets and monuments in common. Similarly, there were other people’s nineteen-thirties. So that, in her middle age, when she was at last allowed all those visitors to the convent—so many visitors being against the Rule, but a special dispensation was enforced on Sandy because of her Treatise— when a man said, “I must have been at school in Edinburgh at the same time as you, Sister Helena,” Sandy, who was now some years Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, clutched the bars of the grille as was her way and peered at him through her little faint eyes and asked him to describe his schooldays and his school, and the Edinburgh he had known. And it turned out, once more, that his was a different Edinburgh from Sandy’s. His school, where he was a boarder, had been cold and grey. His teachers had been supercilious Englishmen, “or near-Englishmen,” said the visitor, “with third-rate degrees.” Sandy could not remember ever having questioned the quality of her teachers’ degrees, and the school had always been lit with the sun or, in winter, with a pearly north light. “But Edinburgh,” said the man, “was a beautiful city, more beautiful then than it is now. Of course, the slums have been cleared. The Old Town was always my favourite. We used to love to explore the Grassmarket and so on. Architecturally speaking, there is no finer sight in Europe.”
    “I once was taken for a walk through the Canon-gate,” Sandy said, “but I was frightened by the squalor.”
    “Well, it was the ’thirties,” said the man. “Tell me, Sister Helena, what would you say was your greatest influence during the ’thirties? I mean, during your teens. Did you read Auden and Eliot?”
    “No,” said Sandy.
    “We boys were very keen on Auden and that group of course. We wanted to go and fight in the Spanish Civil War. On the Republican side, of course. Did you take sides in the Spanish Civil War at your school?”
    “Well, not exactly,” said Sandy. “It was all different for us.”
    “You weren’t a Catholic then, of course?”
    “No,” said Sandy.
    “The influences of one’s teens are very important,” said the man.
    “Oh yes,” said Sandy, “even if they provide something to react against.”
    “What was your biggest influence, then, Sister Helena? Was it political, personal? Was it Calvinism?”
    “Oh no,” said Sandy. “But there was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.” She clutched the bars of the grille as if she wanted to escape from the dim parlour beyond, for she was not composed like the other nuns who sat, when they received their rare visitors, well back in the darkness with folded hands. But Sandy always leaned forward and peered, clutching the bars with both hands, and the other sisters remarked it and said that Sister Helena had too much to bear from the world since she had published her psychological book which was so unexpectedly famed. But the dispensation was forced upon Sandy, and she clutched the bars and received the choice visitors, the psychologists and the Catholic seekers, and the higher journalist ladies and the academics who wanted to question her about her odd psychological treatise on the nature of moral perception, called “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.”
    “We will not go into St. Giles’,” said Miss Brodie, “because the day draws late. But I presume you have all been to St. Giles’ Cathedral?”
    They had nearly all been in St. Giles’ with its tattered blood-stained banners of the past. Sandy had not been there, and did not want to go. The outsides of old Edinburgh churches frightened her, they were of such dark stone, like presences almost the colour of the Castle rock, and were built so warningly with their upraised fingers.
    Miss Brodie had shown them a picture of Cologne Cathedral, like a wedding cake, which looked as if it had been built