“All the girls in the science room were doing just as they liked,” said Sandy, “and that’s what they were supposed to be doing.”

“We do a lot of what we like in Miss Brodie’s class,” Jenny said. “My mummy says Miss Brodie gives us too much freedom.”

“She’s not supposed to give us freedom, she’s supposed to give us lessons,” said Sandy. “But the science class is supposed to be free, it’s allowed.”

“Well, I like being in Miss Brodie’s,” Jenny said.

“So do I,” Sandy said. “She takes an interest in our general knowledge, my mother says.”

All the same, the visits to the science room were Sandy’s most secret joy, and she calculated very carefully the intervals between one ink-spot and another, so that there should be no suspicion on Miss Brodie’s part that the spots were not an accident. Miss Lockhart would hold her arm and carefully dab the ink stain on her sleeve while Sandy stood enthralled by the long room which was this science teacher’s rightful place, and by the lawful glamour of everything there. It was on the occasion when Rose Stanley, after the singing lesson, was sent to the science room to get ink off her blouse that Miss Brodie told her class, “You must be more careful with your ink. I can’t have my girls going up and down to the science room like this. We must keep our good name.”

She added, “Art is greater than science. Art comes first, and then science.”

The large map had been rolled down over the blackboard because they had started the geography lesson. Miss Brodie turned with her pointer to show where Alaska lay. But she turned again to the class and said: “Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that’s their order of importance.”

This was the first winter of the two years that this class spent with Miss Brodie. It had turned nineteen-thirty-one. Miss Brodie had already selected her favourites, or rather those whom she could trust; or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy, these parents being either too enlightened to complain or too unenlightened, or too awed by their good fortune in getting their girls’ education at endowed rates, or too trusting to question the value of what their daughters were learning at this school of sound reputation. Miss Brodie’s special girls were taken home to tea and bidden not to tell the others, they were taken into her confidence, they understood her private life and her feud with the headmistress and the allies of the headmistress. They learned what troubles in her career Miss Brodie encountered on their behalf. “It is for the sake of you girls — my influence, now, in the years of my prime.” This was the beginning of the Brodie set. Eunice Gardiner was so quiet at first, it was difficult to see why she had been drawn in by Miss Brodie. But eventually she cut capers for the relief and amusement of the tea-parties, doing cart-wheels on the carpet. “You are an Ariel,” said Miss Brodie. Then Eunice began to chatter. She was not allowed to do cart-wheels on Sundays, for in many ways Miss Brodie was an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye. Eunice Gardiner did somersaults on the mat only at Saturday gatherings before high teas, or afterwards on Miss Brodie’s kitchen linoleum, while the other girls were washing up and licking honey from the depleted comb off their fingers as they passed it over to be put away in the food cupboard. It was twenty-eight years after Eunice did the splits in Miss Brodie’s flat that she, who had become a nurse and married a doctor, said to her husband one evening: