I wish to inform you that your housekeeper fills me with anxiety like John Knox. I fear she is rather narrow, which arises from an ignorance of culture and the Italian scene. Pray ask her not to say, “You know your way up,” when I call at your house at Cramond. She should take me up and show me in. Her knees are not stiff. She is only pretending that they are.

I love to hear you singing “Hey Johnnie Cope.” But were I to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King of Arms I would decline it. Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.

With fondest joy,

Jean Brodie.

When they had finished writing this letter they read the whole correspondence from beginning to end. They were undecided then whether to cast this incriminating document out to sea or to bury it. The act of casting things out to sea from the shore was, as they knew, more difficult than it sounded. But Sandy found a damp hole half-hidden by a stone at the back of the cave and they pressed into it the notebook containing the love correspondence of Miss Jean Brodie, and never saw it again. They walked back to Crail over the very springy turf full of fresh plans and fondest joy.

4

“I have enough gunpowder in this jar to blow up this school,” said Miss Lockhart in even tones.

She stood behind her bench in her white linen coat, with both hands on a glass jar three-quarters full of a dark grey powder. The extreme hush that fell was only what she expected, for she always opened the first science lesson with these words and with the gunpowder before her, and the first science lesson was no lesson at all, but a naming of the most impressive objects in the science room. Every eye was upon the jar. Miss Lockhart lifted it and placed it carefully in a cupboard which was filled with similar jars full of different-coloured crystals and powders.

“These are bunsen burners, this is a test-tube, this is a pipette, that’s a burette, that is a retort, a crucible…”