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“It’s her fu-ur which is so funny,” giggled the girl. “It's exactly like a fried whiting.”
The boy and girl replace the old couple on the bench where Miss Brill sits. While the boy responds to Miss Brill’s presence with spite and anger, the girl responds with derisive laughter. She ridicules Miss Brill and her fur. Her pronunciation of “fu-ur” stresses her mocking tone. In comparing the fur to fried fish, she destroys the image of the “dear little thing” of Miss Brill’s affections. Instead, the girl sees the fur, and Miss Brill by extension, as something cheap and unappealing.
“No, not now,” said the girl. “Not here, I can’t” . . . . “No, not here,” said the girl. “Not yet.”
The young lovers come to sit on the bench where the old couple had once been. The boy pressures the girl to do something, likely to give him a kiss. She refuses him in a teasing way. She will kiss him, just not here and now. The implied contrast with Miss Brill, the aging spinster, emphasizes aspects of life that Miss Brill apparently has not and never will have. The girl is not only an object of the boy’s desires but is also subject to her own passions. Romance and desire, including all of their joys and sorrows, await the girl, while Miss Brill has lost the opportunity for these experiences and never will have them.
