During that time he painted a little, and she said: “You are still making me look like Jean Brodie.” So he started a new canvas, but it was the same again.

She said: “Why are you obsessed with that woman? Can’t you see she’s ridiculous?”

He said, yes, he could see Jean Brodie was ridiculous. He said, would she kindly stop analysing his mind, it was unnatural in a girl of eighteen.

Miss Brodie telephoned for Sandy to come to see her early in September. She had returned from Germany and Austria which were now magnificently organised. After the war Miss Brodie admitted to Sandy, as they sat in the Braid Hills Hotel, “Hitler was rather naughty,” but at this time she was full of her travels and quite sure the new regime would save the world. Sandy was bored, it did not seem necessary that the world should be saved, only that the poor people in the streets and slums of Edinburgh should be relieved. Miss Brodie said there would be no war. Sandy never had thought so, anyway. Miss Brodie came to the point: “Rose tells me you have become his lover.”

“Yes, does it matter which one of us it is?”

“Whatever possessed you?” said Miss Brodie in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke.

“He interests me,” said Sandy.

“Interests you, forsooth,” said Miss Brodie. “A girl with a mind, a girl with insight. He is a Roman Catholic and I don’t see how you can have to do with a man who can’t think for himself. Rose was suitable. Rose has instinct but no insight.”

Teddy Lloyd continued reproducing Jean Brodie in his paintings. “You have instinct,” Sandy told him, “but no insight, or you would see that the woman isn’t to be taken seriously.”

“I know she isn’t,” he said. “You are too analytical and irritable for your age.”

The family had returned and their meetings were dangerous and exciting. The more she discovered him to be still in love with Jean Brodie, the more she was curious about the mind that loved the woman. By the end of the year it happened that she had quite lost interest in the man himself, but was deeply absorbed in his mind, from which she extracted, among other things, his religion as a pith from a husk. Her mind was as full of his religion as a night sky is full of things visible and invisible.

She left the man and took his religion and became a nun in the course of time.

But that autumn, while she was still probing the mind that invented Miss Brodie on canvas after canvas, Sandy met Miss Brodie several times. She was at first merely resigned to Sandy’s liaison with the art master. Presently she was exultant, and presently again enquired for details, which she did not get.

“His portraits still resemble me?” said Miss Brodie.