Perhaps Miss Brodie had foreseen this moment of the future when her team of six should be exposed to the appeal of four different competing spirits, Argyll, Melrose, Biggar and Holyrood. It was impossible to know how much Miss Brodie planned by deliberation, or how much she worked by instinct alone. However, in this, the first test of her strength, she had the victory. Not one of the senior house-prefects personified an argument to touch Sybil Thorndike and Cleopatra. The Brodie set would as soon have entered the Girl Guides as the team spirit. Not only they, but at least ten other girls who had passed through Brodie hands kept away from the playing grounds except under compulsion. No one, save Eunice Gardiner, got near to being put in any team to try her spirit upon. Everyone agreed that Eunice was so good on the field, she could not help it.

On most Saturday afternoons Miss Brodie entertained her old set to tea and listened to their new experiences. Herself, she told them, she did not think much of her new pupils’ potentialities, and she described some of her new little girls and made the old ones laugh, which bound her set together more than ever and made them feel chosen. Sooner or later she enquired what they were doing in the art class, for now the girls were taught by golden-locked, one-armed Teddy Lloyd.

There was always a great deal to tell about the art lesson. Their first day, Mr. Lloyd found difficulty in keeping order. After so many unfamiliar packed hours and periods of different exact subjects, the girls immediately felt the relaxing nature of the art room, and brimmed over with relaxation. Mr. Lloyd shouted at them in his hoarse voice to shut up. This was most bracing.

He was attempting to explain the nature and 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.