Read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for Free Online Page B

can they be swept away in the urge? If it all happens in a flash ...
    Miss Brodie said, “So I intend simply to point out to Miss Mackay that there is a radical difference in our principles of education. Radical is a word pertaining to roots—Latin radix, a root. We differ at root, the headmistress and I, upon the question whether we are employed to educate the minds of girls or to intrude upon them. We have had this argument before, but Miss Mackay is not, I may say, an outstanding logician. A logician is one skilled in logic. Logic is the art of reasoning. What is logic, Rose?”
    “To do with reasoning, ma’am,” said Rose, who later, while still in her teens, was to provoke Miss Brodie’s amazement and then her awe and finally her abounding enthusiasm for the role which Rose then appeared to be enacting: that of a great lover, magnificently elevated above the ordinary run of lovers, above the moral laws, Venus incarnate, something set apart. In fact, Rose was not at the time in question engaged in the love affair which Miss Brodie thought she was, but it seemed so, and Rose was famous for sex. But in her mere eleventh year, on the winter’s walk, Rose was taking note of the motor cars and Miss Brodie had not yet advanced far enough into her prime to speak of sex except by veiled allusion, as when she said of her warrior lover, “He was a pure man,” or when she read from James Hogg’s poem “Bonnie Kilmeny,”
Kilmeny was pure as pure could be and added, “Which is to say, she did not go to the glen in order to mix with men.”
    “When I see Miss Mackay on Monday morning,” said Miss Brodie, “I shall point out that by the terms of my employment my methods cannot be condemned unless they can be proved to be in any part improper or subversive, and so long as the girls are in the least equipped for the end-of-term examination. I trust you girls to work hard and try and scrape through, even if you learn up the stuff and forget it the next day. As for impropriety, it could never be imputed to me except by some gross distortion on the part of a traitor. I do not think ever to be betrayed. Miss Mackay is younger than I am and higher salaried. That is by accident. The best qualifications available at the University in my time were inferior to those open to Miss Mackay. That is why she holds the senior position. But her reasoning power is deficient, and so I have no fears for Monday.”
    “Miss Mackay has an awfully red face, with the veins all showing,” said Rose.
    “I can’t permit that type of remark to pass in my presence, Rose,” said Miss Brodie, “for it would be disloyal.”
    They had come to the end of Lauriston Place, past the fire station, where they were to get on a tram car to go to tea with Miss Brodie in her flat at Churchhill. A very long queue of men lined this part of the street. They were without collars, in shabby suits. They were talking and spitting and smoking little bits of cigarette held between middle finger and thumb.
    “We shall cross here,” said Miss Brodie and herded the set across the road.
    Monica Douglas whispered, “They are the Idle.” “In England they are called the Unemployed. They are waiting to get their dole from the labour bureau,” said Miss Brodie. “You must all pray for the Unemployed, I will write you out the special prayer for them. You all know what the dole is?”
    Eunice Gardiner had not heard of it.
    “It is the weekly payment made by the State for the relief of the unemployed and their families. Sometimes they go and spend their dole on drink before they go home, and their children starve. They are our brothers. Sandy, stop staring at once. In Italy the Unemployment problem has been solved.”
    Sandy felt that she was not staring across the road at the endless queue of brothers, but that it was pulling her eyes towards it. She felt once more very frightened. Some of the men looked over at the girls, but without seeing them. The girls had reached