Pygmalion

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: In the printed version of this text, all

apostrophes for contractions such as “can’t”, “wouldn’t” and “he’d”

were omitted, to read as “cant”, “wouldnt”, and “hed”. This etext

edition restores the omitted apostrophes.

PYGMALION

BERNARD SHAW

1912

PREFACE TO PYGMALION.

A Professor of Phonetics.

As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel,

which I have supplied in its due place. The English have no respect for

their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They

spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds

like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without

making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish

are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to

Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic

enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular

play. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for

many years past. When I became interested in the subject towards the

end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J.

Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always

covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public

meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another

phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry

Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was

about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel

Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best

of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official

recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for

his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in

general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days

when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph

Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading

monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial

importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a

savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literature

whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The

article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had to

renounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I met

him afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my

astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young

man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal

appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford

and all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own despite

that he was squeezed into something called a Readership of phonetics

there. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all

swore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of

compliance with the university, to which he nevertheless clung by

divine right in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he

has left any, include some satires that may be published without too

destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the

least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he

would not suffer fools gladly.

Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to the

patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and which may be

acquired from a four and six-penny manual published by the Clarendon

Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins describes are such as I have

received from Sweet. I would decipher a sound which a cockney would

represent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding

with some heat what on earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt

for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant but obviously was

the word Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of

making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on earth.

That less expert mortals should require fuller indications was beyond

Sweet’s patience. Therefore, though the whole point of his “Current

Shorthand” is that it can express every sound in the language

perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make

no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n,

and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to

you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite

legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice

to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the

provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but

ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the

popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system.

The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was

a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap

textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to

copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the

necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that

fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of

prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual,

mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly

advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed

upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but

until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman. I have bought

three copies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed by the

publishers that its cloistered existence is still a steady and healthy

one. I actually learned the system two several times; and yet the

shorthand in which I am writing these lines is Pitman’s. And the reason

is, that my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet, having been perforce

taught in the schools of Pitman. Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as

vainly as Thersites railed at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have

eased his soul, gave no popular vogue to Current Shorthand. Pygmalion

Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza

Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are

touches of Sweet in the play. With Higgins’s physique and temperament

Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed

himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made his comparative

personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do justice to his

eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his subject. I do not

blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding a

certain social amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not

exorbitant in its requirements!); for although I well know how hard it

is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain

serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep

all the best places for less important subjects which they profess

without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them,

still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect

them to heap honors on him.

Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little. Among them

towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe his Miltonic

sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all portraiture. But if

the play makes the public aware that there are such people as

phoneticians, and that they are among the most important people in

England at present, it will serve its turn.

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play

all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so

intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so

dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who

repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to

prove my contention that art should never be anything else.

Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with accents that

cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the change

wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl is neither impossible

nor uncommon. The modern concierge’s daughter who fulfils her ambition

by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is

only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their

native dialects and acquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done

scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the

first. An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the

attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect

of the golf club; and I am sorry to say that in spite of the efforts of

our Academy of Dramatic Art, there is still too much sham golfing

English on our stage, and too little of the noble English of Forbes

Robertson.

ACT I

Covent Garden at 11.15 p.m. Torrents of heavy summer rain. Cab whistles

blowing frantically in all directions. Pedestrians running for shelter

into the market and under the portico of St. Paul’s Church, where there

are already several people, among them a lady and her daughter in

evening dress. They are all peering out gloomily at the rain, except

one man with his back turned to the rest, who seems wholly preoccupied

with a notebook in which he is writing busily.

The church clock strikes the first quarter.

THE DAUGHTER [in the space between the central pillars, close to the

one on her left] I’m getting chilled to the bone. What can Freddy be

doing all this time? He’s been gone twenty minutes.

THE MOTHER [on her daughter’s right] Not so long. But he ought to have

got us a cab by this.

A BYSTANDER [on the lady’s right] He won’t get no cab not until

half-past eleven, missus, when they come back after dropping their

theatre fares.

THE MOTHER. But we must have a cab. We can’t stand here until half-past

eleven. It’s too bad.

THE BYSTANDER. Well, it ain’t my fault, missus.

THE DAUGHTER. If Freddy had a bit of gumption, he would have got one at

the theatre door.

THE MOTHER. What could he have done, poor boy?

THE DAUGHTER. Other people got cabs. Why couldn’t he?

Freddy rushes in out of the rain from the Southampton Street side, and

comes between them closing a dripping umbrella. He is a young man of

twenty, in evening dress, very wet around the ankles.

THE DAUGHTER. Well, haven’t you got a cab?

FREDDY. There’s not one to be had for love or money.

THE MOTHER. Oh, Freddy, there must be one. You can’t have tried.

THE DAUGHTER. It’s too tiresome. Do you expect us to go and get one

ourselves?

FREDDY. I tell you they’re all engaged. The rain was so sudden: nobody

was prepared; and everybody had to take a cab. I’ve been to Charing

Cross one way and nearly to Ludgate Circus the other; and they were all

engaged.

THE MOTHER. Did you try Trafalgar Square?

FREDDY. There wasn’t one at Trafalgar Square.

THE DAUGHTER. Did you try?

FREDDY. I tried as far as Charing Cross Station. Did you expect me to

walk to Hammersmith?

THE DAUGHTER. You haven’t tried at all.

THE MOTHER. You really are very helpless, Freddy. Go again; and don’t

come back until you have found a cab.

FREDDY. I shall simply get soaked for nothing.

THE DAUGHTER. And what about us? Are we to stay here all night in this

draught, with next to nothing on. You selfish pig—

FREDDY. Oh, very well: I’ll go, I’ll go. [He opens his umbrella and

dashes off Strandwards, but comes into collision with a flower girl,

who is hurrying in for shelter, knocking her basket out of her hands. A

blinding flash of lightning, followed instantly by a rattling peal of

thunder, orchestrates the incident]

THE FLOWER GIRL. Nah then, Freddy: look wh’ y’ gowin, deah.

FREDDY. Sorry [he rushes off].

THE FLOWER GIRL [picking up her scattered flowers and replacing them in

the basket] There’s menners f’ yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into

the mad. [She sits down on the plinth of the column, sorting her

flowers, on the lady’s right. She is not at all an attractive person.

She is perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older. She wears a

little sailor hat of black straw that has long been exposed to the dust

and soot of London and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs

washing rather badly: its mousy color can hardly be natural. She wears

a shoddy black coat that reaches nearly to her knees and is shaped to

her waist. She has a brown skirt with a coarse apron. Her boots are

much the worse for wear. She is no doubt as clean as she can afford to

be; but compared to the ladies she is very dirty. Her features are no

worse than theirs; but their condition leaves something to be desired;

and she needs the services of a dentist].

THE MOTHER. How do you know that my son’s name is Freddy, pray?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty

bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn

than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f’them? [Here, with

apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a

phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]

THE DAUGHTER. Do nothing of the sort, mother. The idea!

THE MOTHER. Please allow me, Clara. Have you any pennies?

THE DAUGHTER. No. I’ve nothing smaller than sixpence.

THE FLOWER GIRL [hopefully] I can give you change for a tanner, kind

lady.

THE MOTHER [to Clara] Give it to me. [Clara parts reluctantly]. Now [to

the girl] This is for your flowers.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Thank you kindly, lady.

THE DAUGHTER. Make her give you the change. These things are only a

penny a bunch.

THE MOTHER. Do hold your tongue, Clara. [To the girl]. You can keep the

change.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, thank you, lady.

THE MOTHER. Now tell me how you know that young gentleman’s name.

THE FLOWER GIRL. I didn’t.

THE MOTHER. I heard you call him by it. Don’t try to deceive me.

THE FLOWER GIRL [protesting] Who’s trying to deceive you? I called him

Freddy or Charlie same as you might yourself if you was talking to a

stranger and wished to be pleasant. [She sits down beside her basket].

THE DAUGHTER. Sixpence thrown away! Really, mamma, you might have

spared Freddy that. [She retreats in disgust behind the pillar].

An elderly gentleman of the amiable military type rushes into shelter,

and closes a dripping umbrella. He is in the same plight as Freddy,

very wet about the ankles. He is in evening dress, with a light

overcoat. He takes the place left vacant by the daughter’s retirement.

THE GENTLEMAN. Phew!

THE MOTHER [to the gentleman] Oh, sir, is there any sign of its

stopping?

THE GENTLEMAN. I’m afraid not. It started worse than ever about two

minutes ago. [He goes to the plinth beside the flower girl; puts up his

foot on it; and stoops to turn down his trouser ends].

THE MOTHER. Oh, dear! [She retires sadly and joins her daughter].

THE FLOWER GIRL [taking advantage of the military gentleman’s proximity

to establish friendly relations with him]. If it’s worse it’s a sign

it’s nearly over. So cheer up, Captain; and buy a flower off a poor

girl.

THE GENTLEMAN. I’m sorry, I haven’t any change.

THE FLOWER GIRL. I can give you change, Captain,

THE GENTLEMEN. For a sovereign? I’ve nothing less.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Garn! Oh do buy a flower off me, Captain. I can change

half-a-crown. Take this for tuppence.

THE GENTLEMAN. Now don’t be troublesome: there’s a good girl. [Trying

his pockets] I really haven’t any change—Stop: here’s three hapence,

if that’s any use to you [he retreats to the other pillar].

THE FLOWER GIRL [disappointed, but thinking three halfpence better than

nothing] Thank you, sir.

THE BYSTANDER [to the girl] You be careful: give him a flower for it.

There’s a bloke here behind taking down every blessed word you’re

saying. [All turn to the man who is taking notes].

THE FLOWER GIRL [springing up terrified] I ain’t done nothing wrong by

speaking to the gentleman. I’ve a right to sell flowers if I keep off

the kerb. [Hysterically] I’m a respectable girl: so help me, I never

spoke to him except to ask him to buy a flower off me. [General hubbub,

mostly sympathetic to the flower girl, but deprecating her excessive

sensibility. Cries of Don’t start hollerin. Who’s hurting you? Nobody’s

going to touch you. What’s the good of fussing? Steady on. Easy, easy,

etc., come from the elderly staid spectators, who pat her comfortingly.

Less patient ones bid her shut her head, or ask her roughly what is

wrong with her. A remoter group, not knowing what the matter is, crowd

in and increase the noise with question and answer: What’s the row?

What she do? Where is he? A tec taking her down. What! him? Yes: him

over there: Took money off the gentleman, etc. The flower girl,

distraught and mobbed, breaks through them to the gentleman, crying

mildly] Oh, sir, don’t let him charge me. You dunno what it means to

me. They’ll take away my character and drive me on the streets for

speaking to gentlemen. They—

THE NOTE TAKER [coming forward on her right, the rest crowding after

him] There, there, there, there! Who’s hurting you, you silly girl?

What do you take me for?

THE BYSTANDER. It’s all right: he’s a gentleman: look at his boots.

[Explaining to the note taker] She thought you was a copper’s nark, sir.

THE NOTE TAKER [with quick interest] What’s a copper’s nark?

THE BYSTANDER [inept at definition] It’s a—well, it’s a copper’s nark,

as you might say. What else would you call it? A sort of informer.

THE FLOWER GIRL [still hysterical] I take my Bible oath I never said a

word—

THE NOTE TAKER [overbearing but good-humored] Oh, shut up, shut up. Do

I look like a policeman?

THE FLOWER GIRL [far from reassured] Then what did you take down my

words for? How do I know whether you took me down right? You just show

me what you’ve wrote about me. [The note taker opens his book and holds

it steadily under her nose, though the pressure of the mob trying to

read it over his shoulders would upset a weaker man]. What’s that? That

ain’t proper writing. I can’t read that.

THE NOTE TAKER. I can. [Reads, reproducing her pronunciation exactly]

“Cheer ap, Keptin; n’ haw ya flahr orf a pore gel.”

THE FLOWER GIRL [much distressed] It’s because I called him Captain. I

meant no harm. [To the gentleman] Oh, sir, don’t let him lay a charge

agen me for a word like that. You—

THE GENTLEMAN. Charge! I make no charge. [To the note taker] Really,

sir, if you are a detective, you need not begin protecting me against

molestation by young women until I ask you. Anybody could see that the

girl meant no harm.

THE BYSTANDERS GENERALLY [demonstrating against police espionage]

Course they could. What business is it of yours? You mind your own

affairs. He wants promotion, he does. Taking down people’s words! Girl

never said a word to him. What harm if she did? Nice thing a girl can’t

shelter from the rain without being insulted, etc., etc., etc. [She is

conducted by the more sympathetic demonstrators back to her plinth,

where she resumes her seat and struggles with her emotion].

THE BYSTANDER. He ain’t a tec. He’s a blooming busybody: that’s what he

is. I tell you, look at his boots.

THE NOTE TAKER [turning on him genially] And how are all your people

down at Selsey?

THE BYSTANDER [suspiciously] Who told you my people come from Selsey?

THE NOTE TAKER. Never you mind. They did. [To the girl] How do you come

to be up so far east? You were born in Lisson Grove.

THE FLOWER GIRL [appalled] Oh, what harm is there in my leaving Lisson

Grove? It wasn’t fit for a pig to live in; and I had to pay

four-and-six a week. [In tears] Oh, boo—hoo—oo—

THE NOTE TAKER. Live where you like; but stop that noise.

THE GENTLEMAN [to the girl] Come, come! he can’t touch you: you have a

right to live where you please.

A SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [thrusting himself between the note taker and the

gentleman] Park Lane, for instance. I’d like to go into the Housing

Question with you, I would.

THE FLOWER GIRL [subsiding into a brooding melancholy over her basket,

and talking very low-spiritedly to herself] I’m a good girl, I am.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [not attending to her] Do you know where _I_

come from?

THE NOTE TAKER [promptly] Hoxton.

Titterings. Popular interest in the note taker’s performance increases.

THE SARCASTIC ONE [amazed] Well, who said I didn’t? Bly me! You know

everything, you do.

THE FLOWER GIRL [still nursing her sense of injury] Ain’t no call to

meddle with me, he ain’t.

THE BYSTANDER [to her] Of course he ain’t. Don’t you stand it from him.

[To the note taker] See here: what call have you to know about people

what never offered to meddle with you? Where’s your warrant?

SEVERAL BYSTANDERS [encouraged by this seeming point of law] Yes:

where’s your warrant?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Let him say what he likes. I don’t want to have no

truck with him.

THE BYSTANDER. You take us for dirt under your feet, don’t you? Catch

you taking liberties with a gentleman!

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. Yes: tell HIM where he come from if you want

to go fortune-telling.

THE NOTE TAKER. Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, and India.

THE GENTLEMAN. Quite right. [Great laughter. Reaction in the note

taker’s favor. Exclamations of He knows all about it. Told him proper.

Hear him tell the toff where he come from? etc.]. May I ask, sir, do

you do this for your living at a music hall?

THE NOTE TAKER. I’ve thought of that. Perhaps I shall some day.

The rain has stopped; and the persons on the outside of the crowd begin

to drop off.

THE FLOWER GIRL [resenting the reaction] He’s no gentleman, he ain’t,

to interfere with a poor girl.

THE DAUGHTER [out of patience, pushing her way rudely to the front and

displacing the gentleman, who politely retires to the other side of the

pillar] What on earth is Freddy doing? I shall get pneumonia if I stay

in this draught any longer.

THE NOTE TAKER [to himself, hastily making a note of her pronunciation

of “monia”] Earlscourt.

THE DAUGHTER [violently] Will you please keep your impertinent remarks

to yourself?

THE NOTE TAKER. Did I say that out loud? I didn’t mean to. I beg your

pardon. Your mother’s Epsom, unmistakeably.

THE MOTHER [advancing between her daughter and the note taker] How very

curious! I was brought up in Largelady Park, near Epsom.

THE NOTE TAKER [uproariously amused] Ha! ha! What a devil of a name!

Excuse me. [To the daughter] You want a cab, do you?

THE DAUGHTER. Don’t dare speak to me.

THE MOTHER. Oh, please, please Clara. [Her daughter repudiates her with

an angry shrug and retires haughtily.] We should be so grateful to you,

sir, if you found us a cab. [The note taker produces a whistle]. Oh,

thank you. [She joins her daughter]. The note taker blows a piercing

blast.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. There! I knowed he was a plain-clothes copper.

THE BYSTANDER. That ain’t a police whistle: that’s a sporting whistle.

THE FLOWER GIRL [still preoccupied with her wounded feelings] He’s no

right to take away my character. My character is the same to me as any

lady’s.

THE NOTE TAKER. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it; but the rain

stopped about two minutes ago.

THE BYSTANDER. So it has. Why didn’t you say so before? and us losing

our time listening to your silliness. [He walks off towards the Strand].

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. I can tell where you come from. You come from

Anwell. Go back there.

THE NOTE TAKER [helpfully] _H_anwell.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [affecting great distinction of speech] Thenk

you, teacher. Haw haw! So long [he touches his hat with mock respect

and strolls off].

THE FLOWER GIRL. Frightening people like that! How would he like it

himself.

THE MOTHER. It’s quite fine now, Clara. We can walk to a motor bus.

Come. [She gathers her skirts above her ankles and hurries off towards

the Strand].

THE DAUGHTER. But the cab—[her mother is out of hearing]. Oh, how

tiresome! [She follows angrily].

All the rest have gone except the note taker, the gentleman, and the

flower girl, who sits arranging her basket, and still pitying herself

in murmurs.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Poor girl! Hard enough for her to live without being

worrited and chivied.

THE GENTLEMAN [returning to his former place on the note taker’s left]

How do you do it, if I may ask?

THE NOTE TAKER. Simply phonetics. The science of speech. That’s my

profession; also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by

his hobby! You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I

can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in

London. Sometimes within two streets.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ought to be ashamed of himself, unmanly coward!

THE GENTLEMAN. But is there a living in that?

THE NOTE TAKER. Oh yes. Quite a fat one. This is an age of upstarts.

Men begin in Kentish Town with 80 pounds a year, and end in Park Lane

with a hundred thousand. They want to drop Kentish Town; but they give

themselves away every time they open their mouths. Now I can teach

them—

THE FLOWER GIRL. Let him mind his own business and leave a poor girl—

THE NOTE TAKER [explosively] Woman: cease this detestable boohooing

instantly; or else seek the shelter of some other place of worship.

THE FLOWER GIRL [with feeble defiance] I’ve a right to be here if I

like, same as you.

THE NOTE TAKER. A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting

sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live. Remember that you

are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech:

that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and

The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

THE FLOWER GIRL [quite overwhelmed, and looking up at him in mingled

wonder and deprecation without daring to raise her head]

Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—oo!

THE NOTE TAKER [whipping out his book] Heavens! what a sound! [He

writes; then holds out the book and reads, reproducing her vowels

exactly] Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—ow—oo!

THE FLOWER GIRL [tickled by the performance, and laughing in spite of

herself] Garn!

THE NOTE TAKER. You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the

English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well,

sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an

ambassador’s garden party. I could even get her a place as lady’s maid

or shop assistant, which requires better English. That’s the sort of

thing I do for commercial millionaires. And on the profits of it I do

genuine scientific work in phonetics, and a little as a poet on

Miltonic lines.

THE GENTLEMAN. I am myself a student of Indian dialects; and—

THE NOTE TAKER [eagerly] Are you? Do you know Colonel Pickering, the

author of Spoken Sanscrit?

THE GENTLEMAN. I am Colonel Pickering. Who are you?

THE NOTE TAKER. Henry Higgins, author of Higgins’s Universal Alphabet.

PICKERING [with enthusiasm] I came from India to meet you.

HIGGINS. I was going to India to meet you.

PICKERING. Where do you live?

HIGGINS. 27A Wimpole Street. Come and see me tomorrow.

PICKERING. I’m at the Carlton. Come with me now and let’s have a jaw

over some supper.

HIGGINS. Right you are.

THE FLOWER GIRL [to Pickering, as he passes her] Buy a flower, kind

gentleman. I’m short for my lodging.

PICKERING. I really haven’t any change. I’m sorry [he goes away].

HIGGINS [shocked at girl’s mendacity] Liar. You said you could change

half-a-crown.

THE FLOWER GIRL [rising in desperation] You ought to be stuffed with

nails, you ought. [Flinging the basket at his feet] Take the whole

blooming basket for sixpence.

The church clock strikes the second quarter.

HIGGINS [hearing in it the voice of God, rebuking him for his Pharisaic

want of charity to the poor girl] A reminder. [He raises his hat

solemnly; then throws a handful of money into the basket and follows

Pickering].

THE FLOWER GIRL [picking up a half-crown] Ah—ow—ooh! [Picking up a

couple of florins] Aaah—ow—ooh! [Picking up several coins]

Aaaaaah—ow—ooh! [Picking up a half-sovereign]

Aasaaaaaaaaah—ow—ooh!!!

FREDDY [springing out of a taxicab] Got one at last. Hallo! [To the

girl] Where are the two ladies that were here?

THE FLOWER GIRL. They walked to the bus when the rain stopped.

FREDDY. And left me with a cab on my hands. Damnation!

THE FLOWER GIRL [with grandeur] Never you mind, young man. I’m going

home in a taxi. [She sails off to the cab. The driver puts his hand

behind him and holds the door firmly shut against her. Quite

understanding his mistrust, she shows him her handful of money].

Eightpence ain’t no object to me, Charlie. [He grins and opens the

door]. Angel Court, Drury Lane, round the corner of Micklejohn’s oil

shop. Let’s see how fast you can make her hop it. [She gets in and

pulls the door to with a slam as the taxicab starts].

FREDDY. Well, I’m dashed!

ACT II

Next day at 11 a.m. Higgins’s laboratory in Wimpole Street. It is a

room on the first floor, looking on the street, and was meant for the

drawing-room. The double doors are in the middle of the back hall; and

persons entering find in the corner to their right two tall file

cabinets at right angles to one another against the walls. In this

corner stands a flat writing-table, on which are a phonograph, a

laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of lamp

chimneys for singing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the

wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a

life-size image of half a human head, showing in section the vocal

organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the

phonograph.

Further down the room, on the same side, is a fireplace, with a

comfortable leather-covered easy-chair at the side of the hearth

nearest the door, and a coal-scuttle. There is a clock on the

mantelpiece. Between the fireplace and the phonograph table is a stand

for newspapers.

On the other side of the central door, to the left of the visitor, is a

cabinet of shallow drawers. On it is a telephone and the telephone

directory. The corner beyond, and most of the side wall, is occupied by

a grand piano, with the keyboard at the end furthest from the door, and

a bench for the player extending the full length of the keyboard. On

the piano is a dessert dish heaped with fruit and sweets, mostly

chocolates.

The middle of the room is clear. Besides the easy chair, the piano

bench, and two chairs at the phonograph table, there is one stray

chair. It stands near the fireplace. On the walls, engravings; mostly

Piranesis and mezzotint portraits. No paintings.

Pickering is seated at the table, putting down some cards and a

tuning-fork which he has been using. Higgins is standing up near him,

closing two or three file drawers which are hanging out. He appears in

the morning light as a robust, vital, appetizing sort of man of forty

or thereabouts, dressed in a professional-looking black frock-coat with

a white linen collar and black silk tie. He is of the energetic,

scientific type, heartily, even violently interested in everything that

can be studied as a scientific subject, and careless about himself and

other people, including their feelings. He is, in fact, but for his

years and size, rather like a very impetuous baby “taking notice”

eagerly and loudly, and requiring almost as much watching to keep him

out of unintended mischief. His manner varies from genial bullying when

he is in a good humor to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong; but

he is so entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable

even in his least reasonable moments.

HIGGINS [as he shuts the last drawer] Well, I think that’s the whole

show.

PICKERING. It’s really amazing. I haven’t taken half of it in, you know.

HIGGINS. Would you like to go over any of it again?

PICKERING [rising and coming to the fireplace, where he plants himself

with his back to the fire] No, thank you; not now. I’m quite done up

for this morning.

HIGGINS [following him, and standing beside him on his left] Tired of

listening to sounds?

PICKERING. Yes. It’s a fearful strain. I rather fancied myself because

I can pronounce twenty-four distinct vowel sounds; but your hundred and

thirty beat me. I can’t hear a bit of difference between most of them.

HIGGINS [chuckling, and going over to the piano to eat sweets] Oh, that

comes with practice. You hear no difference at first; but you keep on

listening, and presently you find they’re all as different as A from B.

[Mrs. Pearce looks in: she is Higgins’s housekeeper] What’s the matter?

MRS. PEARCE [hesitating, evidently perplexed] A young woman wants to

see you, sir.

HIGGINS. A young woman! What does she want?

MRS. PEARCE. Well, sir, she says you’ll be glad to see her when you

know what she’s come about. She’s quite a common girl, sir. Very common

indeed. I should have sent her away, only I thought perhaps you wanted

her to talk into your machines. I hope I’ve not done wrong; but really

you see such queer people sometimes—you’ll excuse me, I’m sure, sir—

HIGGINS. Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Pearce. Has she an interesting

accent?

MRS. PEARCE. Oh, something dreadful, sir, really. I don’t know how you

can take an interest in it.

HIGGINS [to Pickering] Let’s have her up. Show her up, Mrs. Pearce [he

rushes across to his working table and picks out a cylinder to use on

the phonograph].

MRS. PEARCE [only half resigned to it] Very well, sir. It’s for you to

say. [She goes downstairs].

HIGGINS. This is rather a bit of luck. I’ll show you how I make

records. We’ll set her talking; and I’ll take it down first in Bell’s

visible Speech; then in broad Romic; and then we’ll get her on the

phonograph so that you can turn her on as often as you like with the

written transcript before you.

MRS. PEARCE [returning] This is the young woman, sir.

The flower girl enters in state. She has a hat with three ostrich

feathers, orange, sky-blue, and red. She has a nearly clean apron, and

the shoddy coat has been tidied a little. The pathos of this deplorable

figure, with its innocent vanity and consequential air, touches

Pickering, who has already straightened himself in the presence of Mrs.

Pearce. But as to Higgins, the only distinction he makes between men

and women is that when he is neither bullying nor exclaiming to the

heavens against some featherweight cross, he coaxes women as a child

coaxes its nurse when it wants to get anything out of her.

HIGGINS [brusquely, recognizing her with unconcealed disappointment,

and at once, baby-like, making an intolerable grievance of it] Why,

this is the girl I jotted down last night. She’s no use: I’ve got all

the records I want of the Lisson Grove lingo; and I’m not going to

waste another cylinder on it. [To the girl] Be off with you: I don’t

want you.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Don’t you be so saucy. You ain’t heard what I come for

yet. [To Mrs. Pearce, who is waiting at the door for further

instruction] Did you tell him I come in a taxi?

MRS. PEARCE. Nonsense, girl! what do you think a gentleman like Mr.

Higgins cares what you came in?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, we are proud! He ain’t above giving lessons, not

him: I heard him say so. Well, I ain’t come here to ask for any

compliment; and if my money’s not good enough I can go elsewhere.

HIGGINS. Good enough for what?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Good enough for ye—oo. Now you know, don’t you? I’m

come to have lessons, I am. And to pay for em too: make no mistake.

HIGGINS [stupent] WELL!!! [Recovering his breath with a gasp] What do

you expect me to say to you?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Well, if you was a gentleman, you might ask me to sit

down, I think. Don’t I tell you I’m bringing you business?

HIGGINS. Pickering: shall we ask this baggage to sit down or shall we

throw her out of the window?

THE FLOWER GIRL [running away in terror to the piano, where she turns

at bay] Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—ow—oo! [Wounded and whimpering] I won’t be

called a baggage when I’ve offered to pay like any lady.

Motionless, the two men stare at her from the other side of the room,

amazed.

PICKERING [gently] What is it you want, my girl?

THE FLOWER GIRL. I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of selling

at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. But they won’t take me unless I

can talk more genteel. He said he could teach me. Well, here I am ready

to pay him—not asking any favor—and he treats me as if I was dirt.

MRS. PEARCE. How can you be such a foolish ignorant girl as to think

you could afford to pay Mr. Higgins?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Why shouldn’t I? I know what lessons cost as well as

you do; and I’m ready to pay.

HIGGINS. How much?

THE FLOWER GIRL [coming back to him, triumphant] Now you’re talking! I

thought you’d come off it when you saw a chance of getting back a bit

of what you chucked at me last night. [Confidentially] You’d had a drop

in, hadn’t you?

HIGGINS [peremptorily] Sit down.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, if you’re going to make a compliment of it—

HIGGINS [thundering at her] Sit down.

MRS. PEARCE [severely] Sit down, girl. Do as you’re told. [She places

the stray chair near the hearthrug between Higgins and Pickering, and

stands behind it waiting for the girl to sit down].

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—oo! [She stands, half rebellious,

half bewildered].

PICKERING [very courteous] Won’t you sit down?

LIZA [coyly] Don’t mind if I do. [She sits down. Pickering returns to

the hearthrug].

HIGGINS. What’s your name?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Liza Doolittle.

HIGGINS [declaiming gravely]

Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy and Bess,

They went to the woods to get a bird’s nes’:

PICKERING. They found a nest with four eggs in it:

HIGGINS. They took one apiece, and left three in it.

They laugh heartily at their own wit.

LIZA. Oh, don’t be silly.

MRS. PEARCE. You mustn’t speak to the gentleman like that.

LIZA. Well, why won’t he speak sensible to me?

HIGGINS. Come back to business. How much do you propose to pay me for

the lessons?

LIZA. Oh, I know what’s right. A lady friend of mine gets French

lessons for eighteenpence an hour from a real French gentleman. Well,

you wouldn’t have the face to ask me the same for teaching me my own

language as you would for French; so I won’t give more than a shilling.

Take it or leave it.

HIGGINS [walking up and down the room, rattling his keys and his cash

in his pockets] You know, Pickering, if you consider a shilling, not as

a simple shilling, but as a percentage of this girl’s income, it works

out as fully equivalent to sixty or seventy guineas from a millionaire.

PICKERING. How so?

HIGGINS. Figure it out. A millionaire has about 150 pounds a day. She

earns about half-a-crown.

LIZA [haughtily] Who told you I only—

HIGGINS [continuing] She offers me two-fifths of her day’s income for a

lesson. Two-fifths of a millionaire’s income for a day would be

somewhere about 60 pounds. It’s handsome. By George, it’s enormous!

it’s the biggest offer I ever had.

LIZA [rising, terrified] Sixty pounds! What are you talking about? I

never offered you sixty pounds. Where would I get—

HIGGINS. Hold your tongue.

LIZA [weeping] But I ain’t got sixty pounds. Oh—

MRS. PEARCE. Don’t cry, you silly girl. Sit down. Nobody is going to

touch your money.

HIGGINS. Somebody is going to touch you, with a broomstick, if you

don’t stop snivelling. Sit down.

LIZA [obeying slowly] Ah—ah—ah—ow—oo—o! One would think you was my

father.

HIGGINS. If I decide to teach you, I’ll be worse than two fathers to

you. Here [he offers her his silk handkerchief]!

LIZA. What’s this for?

HIGGINS. To wipe your eyes. To wipe any part of your face that feels

moist. Remember: that’s your handkerchief; and that’s your sleeve.

Don’t mistake the one for the other if you wish to become a lady in a

shop.

Liza, utterly bewildered, stares helplessly at him.

MRS. PEARCE. It’s no use talking to her like that, Mr. Higgins: she

doesn’t understand you. Besides, you’re quite wrong: she doesn’t do it

that way at all [she takes the handkerchief].

LIZA [snatching it] Here! You give me that handkerchief. He give it to

me, not to you.

PICKERING [laughing] He did. I think it must be regarded as her

property, Mrs. Pearce.

MRS. PEARCE [resigning herself] Serve you right, Mr. Higgins.

PICKERING. Higgins: I’m interested. What about the ambassador’s garden

party? I’ll say you’re the greatest teacher alive if you make that

good. I’ll bet you all the expenses of the experiment you can’t do it.

And I’ll pay for the lessons.

LIZA. Oh, you are real good. Thank you, Captain.

HIGGINS [tempted, looking at her] It’s almost irresistible. She’s so

deliciously low—so horribly dirty—

LIZA [protesting extremely] Ah—ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—oooo!!! I ain’t

dirty: I washed my face and hands afore I come, I did.

PICKERING. You’re certainly not going to turn her head with flattery,

Higgins.

MRS. PEARCE [uneasy] Oh, don’t say that, sir: there’s more ways than

one of turning a girl’s head; and nobody can do it better than Mr.

Higgins, though he may not always mean it. I do hope, sir, you won’t

encourage him to do anything foolish.

HIGGINS [becoming excited as the idea grows on him] What is life but a

series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never

lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day. I shall make a duchess of

this draggletailed guttersnipe.

LIZA [strongly deprecating this view of her] Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—oo!

HIGGINS [carried away] Yes: in six months—in three if she has a good

ear and a quick tongue—I’ll take her anywhere and pass her off as

anything. We’ll start today: now! this moment! Take her away and clean

her, Mrs. Pearce. Monkey Brand, if it won’t come off any other way. Is

there a good fire in the kitchen?

MRS. PEARCE [protesting]. Yes; but—

HIGGINS [storming on] Take all her clothes off and burn them. Ring up

Whiteley or somebody for new ones. Wrap her up in brown paper till they

come.

LIZA. You’re no gentleman, you’re not, to talk of such things. I’m a

good girl, I am; and I know what the like of you are, I do.

HIGGINS. We want none of your Lisson Grove prudery here, young woman.

You’ve got to learn to behave like a duchess. Take her away, Mrs.

Pearce. If she gives you any trouble wallop her.

LIZA [springing up and running between Pickering and Mrs. Pearce for

protection] No! I’ll call the police, I will.

MRS. PEARCE. But I’ve no place to put her.

HIGGINS. Put her in the dustbin.

LIZA. Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—oo!

PICKERING. Oh come, Higgins! be reasonable.

MRS. PEARCE [resolutely] You must be reasonable, Mr. Higgins: really

you must. You can’t walk over everybody like this.

Higgins, thus scolded, subsides. The hurricane is succeeded by a zephyr

of amiable surprise.

HIGGINS [with professional exquisiteness of modulation] I walk over

everybody! My dear Mrs. Pearce, my dear Pickering, I never had the

slightest intention of walking over anyone. All I propose is that we

should be kind to this poor girl. We must help her to prepare and fit

herself for her new station in life. If I did not express myself

clearly it was because I did not wish to hurt her delicacy, or yours.

Liza, reassured, steals back to her chair.

MRS. PEARCE [to Pickering] Well, did you ever hear anything like that,

sir?

PICKERING [laughing heartily] Never, Mrs. Pearce: never.

HIGGINS [patiently] What’s the matter?

MRS. PEARCE. Well, the matter is, sir, that you can’t take a girl up

like that as if you were picking up a pebble on the beach.

HIGGINS. Why not?

MRS. PEARCE. Why not! But you don’t know anything about her. What about

her parents? She may be married.

LIZA. Garn!

HIGGINS. There! As the girl very properly says, Garn! Married indeed!

Don’t you know that a woman of that class looks a worn out drudge of

fifty a year after she’s married.

LIZA. Who’d marry me?

HIGGINS [suddenly resorting to the most thrillingly beautiful low tones

in his best elocutionary style] By George, Eliza, the streets will be

strewn with the bodies of men shooting themselves for your sake before

I’ve done with you.

MRS. PEARCE. Nonsense, sir. You mustn’t talk like that to her.

LIZA [rising and squaring herself determinedly] I’m going away. He’s

off his chump, he is. I don’t want no balmies teaching me.

HIGGINS [wounded in his tenderest point by her insensibility to his

elocution] Oh, indeed! I’m mad, am I? Very well, Mrs. Pearce: you

needn’t order the new clothes for her. Throw her out.

LIZA [whimpering] Nah—ow. You got no right to touch me.

MRS. PEARCE. You see now what comes of being saucy. [Indicating the

door] This way, please.

LIZA [almost in tears] I didn’t want no clothes. I wouldn’t have taken

them [she throws away the handkerchief]. I can buy my own clothes.

HIGGINS [deftly retrieving the handkerchief and intercepting her on her

reluctant way to the door] You’re an ungrateful wicked girl. This is my

return for offering to take you out of the gutter and dress you

beautifully and make a lady of you.

MRS. PEARCE. Stop, Mr. Higgins. I won’t allow it. It’s you that are

wicked. Go home to your parents, girl; and tell them to take better

care of you.

LIZA. I ain’t got no parents. They told me I was big enough to earn my

own living and turned me out.

MRS. PEARCE. Where’s your mother?

LIZA. I ain’t got no mother. Her that turned me out was my sixth

stepmother. But I done without them. And I’m a good girl, I am.

HIGGINS. Very well, then, what on earth is all this fuss about? The

girl doesn’t belong to anybody—is no use to anybody but me. [He goes

to Mrs. Pearce and begins coaxing]. You can adopt her, Mrs. Pearce: I’m

sure a daughter would be a great amusement to you. Now don’t make any

more fuss. Take her downstairs; and—

MRS. PEARCE. But what’s to become of her? Is she to be paid anything?

Do be sensible, sir.

HIGGINS. Oh, pay her whatever is necessary: put it down in the

housekeeping book. [Impatiently] What on earth will she want with

money? She’ll have her food and her clothes. She’ll only drink if you

give her money.

LIZA [turning on him] Oh you are a brute. It’s a lie: nobody ever saw

the sign of liquor on me. [She goes back to her chair and plants

herself there defiantly].

PICKERING [in good-humored remonstrance] Does it occur to you, Higgins,

that the girl has some feelings?

HIGGINS [looking critically at her] Oh no, I don’t think so. Not any

feelings that we need bother about. [Cheerily] Have you, Eliza?

LIZA. I got my feelings same as anyone else.

HIGGINS [to Pickering, reflectively] You see the difficulty?

PICKERING. Eh? What difficulty?

HIGGINS. To get her to talk grammar. The mere pronunciation is easy

enough.

LIZA. I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

MRS. PEARCE. Will you please keep to the point, Mr. Higgins. I want to

know on what terms the girl is to be here. Is she to have any wages?

And what is to become of her when you’ve finished your teaching? You

must look ahead a little.

HIGGINS [impatiently] What’s to become of her if I leave her in the

gutter? Tell me that, Mrs. Pearce.

MRS. PEARCE. That’s her own business, not yours, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Well, when I’ve done with her, we can throw her back into the

gutter; and then it will be her own business again; so that’s all right.

LIZA. Oh, you’ve no feeling heart in you: you don’t care for nothing

but yourself [she rises and takes the floor resolutely]. Here! I’ve had

enough of this. I’m going [making for the door]. You ought to be

ashamed of yourself, you ought.

HIGGINS [snatching a chocolate cream from the piano, his eyes suddenly

beginning to twinkle with mischief] Have some chocolates, Eliza.

LIZA [halting, tempted] How do I know what might be in them? I’ve heard

of girls being drugged by the like of you.

Higgins whips out his penknife; cuts a chocolate in two; puts one half

into his mouth and bolts it; and offers her the other half.

HIGGINS. Pledge of good faith, Eliza. I eat one half you eat the other.

[Liza opens her mouth to retort: he pops the half chocolate into it].

You shall have boxes of them, barrels of them, every day. You shall

live on them. Eh?

LIZA [who has disposed of the chocolate after being nearly choked by

it] I wouldn’t have ate it, only I’m too ladylike to take it out of my

mouth.

HIGGINS. Listen, Eliza. I think you said you came in a taxi.

LIZA. Well, what if I did? I’ve as good a right to take a taxi as

anyone else.

HIGGINS. You have, Eliza; and in future you shall have as many taxis as

you want. You shall go up and down and round the town in a taxi every

day. Think of that, Eliza.

MRS. PEARCE. Mr. Higgins: you’re tempting the girl. It’s not right. She

should think of the future.

HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when

you haven’t any future to think of. No, Eliza: do as this lady does:

think of other people’s futures; but never think of your own. Think of

chocolates, and taxis, and gold, and diamonds.

LIZA. No: I don’t want no gold and no diamonds. I’m a good girl, I am.

[She sits down again, with an attempt at dignity].

HIGGINS. You shall remain so, Eliza, under the care of Mrs. Pearce. And

you shall marry an officer in the Guards, with a beautiful moustache:

the son of a marquis, who will disinherit him for marrying you, but

will relent when he sees your beauty and goodness—

PICKERING. Excuse me, Higgins; but I really must interfere. Mrs. Pearce

is quite right. If this girl is to put herself in your hands for six

months for an experiment in teaching, she must understand thoroughly

what she’s doing.

HIGGINS. How can she? She’s incapable of understanding anything.

Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we

ever do it?

PICKERING. Very clever, Higgins; but not sound sense. [To Eliza] Miss

Doolittle—

LIZA [overwhelmed] Ah—ah—ow—oo!

HIGGINS. There! That’s all you get out of Eliza. Ah—ah—ow—oo! No use

explaining. As a military man you ought to know that. Give her her

orders: that’s what she wants. Eliza: you are to live here for the next

six months, learning how to speak beautifully, like a lady in a

florist’s shop. If you’re good and do whatever you’re told, you shall

sleep in a proper bedroom, and have lots to eat, and money to buy

chocolates and take rides in taxis. If you’re naughty and idle you will

sleep in the back kitchen among the black beetles, and be walloped by

Mrs. Pearce with a broomstick. At the end of six months you shall go to

Buckingham Palace in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the King finds

out you’re not a lady, you will be taken by the police to the Tower of

London, where your head will be cut off as a warning to other

presumptuous flower girls. If you are not found out, you shall have a

present of seven-and-sixpence to start life with as a lady in a shop.

If you refuse this offer you will be a most ungrateful and wicked girl;

and the angels will weep for you. [To Pickering] Now are you satisfied,

Pickering? [To Mrs. Pearce] Can I put it more plainly and fairly, Mrs.

Pearce?

MRS. PEARCE [patiently] I think you’d better let me speak to the girl

properly in private. I don’t know that I can take charge of her or

consent to the arrangement at all. Of course I know you don’t mean her

any harm; but when you get what you call interested in people’s

accents, you never think or care what may happen to them or you. Come

with me, Eliza.

HIGGINS. That’s all right. Thank you, Mrs. Pearce. Bundle her off to

the bath-room.

LIZA [rising reluctantly and suspiciously] You’re a great bully, you

are. I won’t stay here if I don’t like. I won’t let nobody wallop me. I

never asked to go to Bucknam Palace, I didn’t. I was never in trouble

with the police, not me. I’m a good girl—

MRS. PEARCE. Don’t answer back, girl. You don’t understand the

gentleman. Come with me. [She leads the way to the door, and holds it

open for Eliza].

LIZA [as she goes out] Well, what I say is right. I won’t go near the

king, not if I’m going to have my head cut off. If I’d known what I was

letting myself in for, I wouldn’t have come here. I always been a good

girl; and I never offered to say a word to him; and I don’t owe him

nothing; and I don’t care; and I won’t be put upon; and I have my

feelings the same as anyone else—

Mrs. Pearce shuts the door; and Eliza’s plaints are no longer audible.

Pickering comes from the hearth to the chair and sits astride it with

his arms on the back.

PICKERING. Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good

character where women are concerned?

HIGGINS [moodily] Have you ever met a man of good character where women

are concerned?

PICKERING. Yes: very frequently.

HIGGINS [dogmatically, lifting himself on his hands to the level of the

piano, and sitting on it with a bounce] Well, I haven’t. I find that

the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous,

exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I

let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical.

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that

the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.

PICKERING. At what, for example?

HIGGINS [coming off the piano restlessly] Oh, Lord knows! I suppose the

woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and

each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go

north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east,

though they both hate the east wind. [He sits down on the bench at the

keyboard]. So here I am, a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain

so.

PICKERING [rising and standing over him gravely] Come, Higgins! You

know what I mean. If I’m to be in this business I shall feel

responsible for that girl. I hope it’s understood that no advantage is

to be taken of her position.

HIGGINS. What! That thing! Sacred, I assure you. [Rising to explain]

You see, she’ll be a pupil; and teaching would be impossible unless

pupils were sacred. I’ve taught scores of American millionairesses how

to speak English: the best looking women in the world. I’m seasoned.

They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of

wood. It’s—

Mrs. Pearce opens the door. She has Eliza’s hat in her hand. Pickering

retires to the easy-chair at the hearth and sits down.

HIGGINS [eagerly] Well, Mrs. Pearce: is it all right?

MRS. PEARCE [at the door] I just wish to trouble you with a word, if I

may, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Yes, certainly. Come in. [She comes forward]. Don’t burn that,

Mrs. Pearce. I’ll keep it as a curiosity. [He takes the hat].

MRS. PEARCE. Handle it carefully, sir, please. I had to promise her not

to burn it; but I had better put it in the oven for a while.

HIGGINS [putting it down hastily on the piano] Oh! thank you. Well,

what have you to say to me?

PICKERING. Am I in the way?

MRS. PEARCE. Not at all, sir. Mr. Higgins: will you please be very

particular what you say before the girl?

HIGGINS [sternly] Of course. I’m always particular about what I say.

Why do you say this to me?

MRS. PEARCE [unmoved] No, sir: you’re not at all particular when you’ve

mislaid anything or when you get a little impatient. Now it doesn’t

matter before me: I’m used to it. But you really must not swear before

the girl.

HIGGINS [indignantly] I swear! [Most emphatically] I never swear. I

detest the habit. What the devil do you mean?

MRS. PEARCE [stolidly] That’s what I mean, sir. You swear a great deal

too much. I don’t mind your damning and blasting, and what the devil

and where the devil and who the devil—

HIGGINS. Really! Mrs. Pearce: this language from your lips!

MRS. PEARCE [not to be put off]—but there is a certain word I must ask

you not to use. The girl has just used it herself because the bath was

too hot. It begins with the same letter as bath. She knows no better:

she learnt it at her mother’s knee. But she must not hear it from your

lips.

HIGGINS [loftily] I cannot charge myself with having ever uttered it,

Mrs. Pearce. [She looks at him steadfastly. He adds, hiding an uneasy

conscience with a judicial air] Except perhaps in a moment of extreme

and justifiable excitement.

MRS. PEARCE. Only this morning, sir, you applied it to your boots, to

the butter, and to the brown bread.

HIGGINS. Oh, that! Mere alliteration, Mrs. Pearce, natural to a poet.

MRS. PEARCE. Well, sir, whatever you choose to call it, I beg you not

to let the girl hear you repeat it.

HIGGINS. Oh, very well, very well. Is that all?

MRS. PEARCE. No, sir. We shall have to be very particular with this

girl as to personal cleanliness.

HIGGINS. Certainly. Quite right. Most important.

MRS. PEARCE. I mean not to be slovenly about her dress or untidy in

leaving things about.

HIGGINS [going to her solemnly] Just so. I intended to call your

attention to that [He passes on to Pickering, who is enjoying the

conversation immensely]. It is these little things that matter,

Pickering. Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of

themselves is as true of personal habits as of money. [He comes to

anchor on the hearthrug, with the air of a man in an unassailable

position].

MRS. PEARCE. Yes, sir. Then might I ask you not to come down to

breakfast in your dressing-gown, or at any rate not to use it as a

napkin to the extent you do, sir. And if you would be so good as not to

eat everything off the same plate, and to remember not to put the

porridge saucepan out of your hand on the clean tablecloth, it would be

a better example to the girl. You know you nearly choked yourself with

a fishbone in the jam only last week.

HIGGINS [routed from the hearthrug and drifting back to the piano] I

may do these things sometimes in absence of mind; but surely I don’t do

them habitually. [Angrily] By the way: my dressing-gown smells most

damnably of benzine.

MRS. PEARCE. No doubt it does, Mr. Higgins. But if you will wipe your

fingers—

HIGGINS [yelling] Oh very well, very well: I’ll wipe them in my hair in

future.

MRS. PEARCE. I hope you’re not offended, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS [shocked at finding himself thought capable of an unamiable

sentiment] Not at all, not at all. You’re quite right, Mrs. Pearce: I

shall be particularly careful before the girl. Is that all?

MRS. PEARCE. No, sir. Might she use some of those Japanese dresses you

brought from abroad? I really can’t put her back into her old things.

HIGGINS. Certainly. Anything you like. Is that all?

MRS. PEARCE. Thank you, sir. That’s all. [She goes out].

HIGGINS. You know, Pickering, that woman has the most extraordinary

ideas about me. Here I am, a shy, diffident sort of man. I’ve never

been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like other chaps. And

yet she’s firmly persuaded that I’m an arbitrary overbearing bossing

kind of person. I can’t account for it.

Mrs. Pearce returns.

MRS. PEARCE. If you please, sir, the trouble’s beginning already.

There’s a dustman downstairs, Alfred Doolittle, wants to see you. He

says you have his daughter here.

PICKERING [rising] Phew! I say! [He retreats to the hearthrug].

HIGGINS [promptly] Send the blackguard up.

MRS. PEARCE. Oh, very well, sir. [She goes out].

PICKERING. He may not be a blackguard, Higgins.

HIGGINS. Nonsense. Of course he’s a blackguard.

PICKERING. Whether he is or not, I’m afraid we shall have some trouble

with him.

HIGGINS [confidently] Oh no: I think not. If there’s any trouble he

shall have it with me, not I with him. And we are sure to get something

interesting out of him.

PICKERING. About the girl?

HIGGINS. No. I mean his dialect.

PICKERING. Oh!

MRS. PEARCE [at the door] Doolittle, sir. [She admits Doolittle and

retires].

Alfred Doolittle is an elderly but vigorous dustman, clad in the

costume of his profession, including a hat with a back brim covering

his neck and shoulders. He has well marked and rather interesting

features, and seems equally free from fear and conscience. He has a

remarkably expressive voice, the result of a habit of giving vent to

his feelings without reserve. His present pose is that of wounded honor

and stern resolution.

DOOLITTLE [at the door, uncertain which of the two gentlemen is his

man] Professor Higgins?

HIGGINS. Here. Good morning. Sit down.

DOOLITTLE. Morning, Governor. [He sits down magisterially] I come about

a very serious matter, Governor.

HIGGINS [to Pickering] Brought up in Hounslow. Mother Welsh, I should

think. [Doolittle opens his mouth, amazed. Higgins continues] What do

you want, Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE [menacingly] I want my daughter: that’s what I want. See?

HIGGINS. Of course you do. You’re her father, aren’t you? You don’t

suppose anyone else wants her, do you? I’m glad to see you have some

spark of family feeling left. She’s upstairs. Take her away at once.

DOOLITTLE [rising, fearfully taken aback] What!

HIGGINS. Take her away. Do you suppose I’m going to keep your daughter

for you?

DOOLITTLE [remonstrating] Now, now, look here, Governor. Is this

reasonable? Is it fair to take advantage of a man like this? The girl

belongs to me. You got her. Where do I come in? [He sits down again].

HIGGINS. Your daughter had the audacity to come to my house and ask me

to teach her how to speak properly so that she could get a place in a

flower-shop. This gentleman and my housekeeper have been here all the

time. [Bullying him] How dare you come here and attempt to blackmail

me? You sent her here on purpose.

DOOLITTLE [protesting] No, Governor.

HIGGINS. You must have. How else could you possibly know that she is

here?

DOOLITTLE. Don’t take a man up like that, Governor.

HIGGINS. The police shall take you up. This is a plant—a plot to

extort money by threats. I shall telephone for the police [he goes

resolutely to the telephone and opens the directory].

DOOLITTLE. Have I asked you for a brass farthing? I leave it to the

gentleman here: have I said a word about money?

HIGGINS [throwing the book aside and marching down on Doolittle with a

poser] What else did you come for?

DOOLITTLE [sweetly] Well, what would a man come for? Be human, governor.

HIGGINS [disarmed] Alfred: did you put her up to it?

DOOLITTLE. So help me, Governor, I never did. I take my Bible oath I

ain’t seen the girl these two months past.

HIGGINS. Then how did you know she was here?

DOOLITTLE [“most musical, most melancholy”] I’ll tell you, Governor, if

you’ll only let me get a word in. I’m willing to tell you. I’m wanting

to tell you. I’m waiting to tell you.

HIGGINS. Pickering: this chap has a certain natural gift of rhetoric.

Observe the rhythm of his native woodnotes wild. “I’m willing to tell

you: I’m wanting to tell you: I’m waiting to tell you.” Sentimental

rhetoric! That’s the Welsh strain in him. It also accounts for his

mendacity and dishonesty.

PICKERING. Oh, PLEASE, Higgins: I’m west country myself. [To Doolittle]

How did you know the girl was here if you didn’t send her?

DOOLITTLE. It was like this, Governor. The girl took a boy in the taxi

to give him a jaunt. Son of her landlady, he is. He hung about on the

chance of her giving him another ride home. Well, she sent him back for

her luggage when she heard you was willing for her to stop here. I met

the boy at the corner of Long Acre and Endell Street.

HIGGINS. Public house. Yes?

DOOLITTLE. The poor man’s club, Governor: why shouldn’t I?

PICKERING. Do let him tell his story, Higgins.

DOOLITTLE. He told me what was up. And I ask you, what was my feelings

and my duty as a father? I says to the boy, “You bring me the luggage,”

I says—

PICKERING. Why didn’t you go for it yourself?

DOOLITTLE. Landlady wouldn’t have trusted me with it, Governor. She’s

that kind of woman: you know. I had to give the boy a penny afore he

trusted me with it, the little swine. I brought it to her just to

oblige you like, and make myself agreeable. That’s all.

HIGGINS. How much luggage?

DOOLITTLE. Musical instrument, Governor. A few pictures, a trifle of

jewelry, and a bird-cage. She said she didn’t want no clothes. What was

I to think from that, Governor? I ask you as a parent what was I to

think?

HIGGINS. So you came to rescue her from worse than death, eh?

DOOLITTLE [appreciatively: relieved at being understood] Just so,

Governor. That’s right.

PICKERING. But why did you bring her luggage if you intended to take

her away?

DOOLITTLE. Have I said a word about taking her away? Have I now?

HIGGINS [determinedly] You’re going to take her away, double quick. [He

crosses to the hearth and rings the bell].

DOOLITTLE [rising] No, Governor. Don’t say that. I’m not the man to

stand in my girl’s light. Here’s a career opening for her, as you might

say; and—

Mrs. Pearce opens the door and awaits orders.

HIGGINS. Mrs. Pearce: this is Eliza’s father. He has come to take her

away. Give her to him. [He goes back to the piano, with an air of

washing his hands of the whole affair].

DOOLITTLE. No. This is a misunderstanding. Listen here—

MRS. PEARCE. He can’t take her away, Mr. Higgins: how can he? You told

me to burn her clothes.

DOOLITTLE. That’s right. I can’t carry the girl through the streets

like a blooming monkey, can I? I put it to you.

HIGGINS. You have put it to me that you want your daughter. Take your

daughter. If she has no clothes go out and buy her some.

DOOLITTLE [desperate] Where’s the clothes she come in? Did I burn them

or did your missus here?

MRS. PEARCE. I am the housekeeper, if you please. I have sent for some

clothes for your girl. When they come you can take her away. You can

wait in the kitchen. This way, please.

Doolittle, much troubled, accompanies her to the door; then hesitates;

finally turns confidentially to Higgins.

DOOLITTLE. Listen here, Governor. You and me is men of the world, ain’t

we?

HIGGINS. Oh! Men of the world, are we? You’d better go, Mrs. Pearce.

MRS. PEARCE. I think so, indeed, sir. [She goes, with dignity].

PICKERING. The floor is yours, Mr. Doolittle.

DOOLITTLE [to Pickering] I thank you, Governor. [To Higgins, who takes

refuge on the piano bench, a little overwhelmed by the proximity of his

visitor; for Doolittle has a professional flavor of dust about him].

Well, the truth is, I’ve taken a sort of fancy to you, Governor; and if

you want the girl, I’m not so set on having her back home again but

what I might be open to an arrangement. Regarded in the light of a

young woman, she’s a fine handsome girl. As a daughter she’s not worth

her keep; and so I tell you straight. All I ask is my rights as a

father; and you’re the last man alive to expect me to let her go for

nothing; for I can see you’re one of the straight sort, Governor. Well,

what’s a five pound note to you? And what’s Eliza to me? [He returns to

his chair and sits down judicially].

PICKERING. I think you ought to know, Doolittle, that Mr. Higgins’s

intentions are entirely honorable.

DOOLITTLE. Course they are, Governor. If I thought they wasn’t, I’d ask

fifty.

HIGGINS [revolted] Do you mean to say, you callous rascal, that you

would sell your daughter for 50 pounds?

DOOLITTLE. Not in a general way I wouldn’t; but to oblige a gentleman

like you I’d do a good deal, I do assure you.

PICKERING. Have you no morals, man?

DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Can’t afford them, Governor. Neither could you if

you was as poor as me. Not that I mean any harm, you know. But if Liza

is going to have a bit out of this, why not me too?

HIGGINS [troubled] I don’t know what to do, Pickering. There can be no

question that as a matter of morals it’s a positive crime to give this

chap a farthing. And yet I feel a sort of rough justice in his claim.

DOOLITTLE. That’s it, Governor. That’s all I say. A father’s heart, as

it were.

PICKERING. Well, I know the feeling; but really it seems hardly right—

DOOLITTLE. Don’t say that, Governor. Don’t look at it that way. What am

I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving

poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means

that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s

anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same

story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.” But my needs is as

great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six

different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I

don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less

hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement,

cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band

when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as

they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an

excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two

gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you.

I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go

on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth. Will you take

advantage of a man’s nature to do him out of the price of his own

daughter what he’s brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his

brow until she’s growed big enough to be interesting to you two

gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it

to you.

HIGGINS [rising, and going over to Pickering] Pickering: if we were to

take this man in hand for three months, he could choose between a seat

in the Cabinet and a popular pulpit in Wales.

PICKERING. What do you say to that, Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE. Not me, Governor, thank you kindly. I’ve heard all the

preachers and all the prime ministers—for I’m a thinking man and game

for politics or religion or social reform same as all the other

amusements—and I tell you it’s a dog’s life anyway you look at it.

Undeserving poverty is my line. Taking one station in society with

another, it’s—it’s—well, it’s the only one that has any ginger in it,

to my taste.

HIGGINS. I suppose we must give him a fiver.

PICKERING. He’ll make a bad use of it, I’m afraid.

DOOLITTLE. Not me, Governor, so help me I won’t. Don’t you be afraid

that I’ll save it and spare it and live idle on it. There won’t be a

penny of it left by Monday: I’ll have to go to work same as if I’d

never had it. It won’t pauperize me, you bet. Just one good spree for

myself and the missus, giving pleasure to ourselves and employment to

others, and satisfaction to you to think it’s not been throwed away.

You couldn’t spend it better.

HIGGINS [taking out his pocket book and coming between Doolittle and

the piano] This is irresistible. Let’s give him ten. [He offers two

notes to the dustman].

DOOLITTLE. No, Governor. She wouldn’t have the heart to spend ten; and

perhaps I shouldn’t neither. Ten pounds is a lot of money: it makes a

man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what

I ask you, Governor: not a penny more, and not a penny less.

PICKERING. Why don’t you marry that missus of yours? I rather draw the

line at encouraging that sort of immorality.

DOOLITTLE. Tell her so, Governor: tell her so. I’m willing. It’s me

that suffers by it. I’ve no hold on her. I got to be agreeable to her.

I got to give her presents. I got to buy her clothes something sinful.

I’m a slave to that woman, Governor, just because I’m not her lawful

husband. And she knows it too. Catch her marrying me! Take my advice,

Governor: marry Eliza while she’s young and don’t know no better. If

you don’t you’ll be sorry for it after. If you do, she’ll be sorry for

it after; but better you than her, because you’re a man, and she’s only

a woman and don’t know how to be happy anyhow.

HIGGINS. Pickering: if we listen to this man another minute, we shall

have no convictions left. [To Doolittle] Five pounds I think you said.

DOOLITTLE. Thank you kindly, Governor.

HIGGINS. You’re sure you won’t take ten?

DOOLITTLE. Not now. Another time, Governor.

HIGGINS [handing him a five-pound note] Here you are.

DOOLITTLE. Thank you, Governor. Good morning.

[He hurries to the door, anxious to get away with his booty. When he

opens it he is confronted with a dainty and exquisitely clean young

Japanese lady in a simple blue cotton kimono printed cunningly with

small white jasmine blossoms. Mrs. Pearce is with her. He gets out of

her way deferentially and apologizes]. Beg pardon, miss.

THE JAPANESE LADY. Garn! Don’t you know your own daughter?

DOOLITTLE {exclaiming Bly me! it’s Eliza!

HIGGINS {simul- What’s that! This!

PICKERING {taneously By Jove!

LIZA. Don’t I look silly?

HIGGINS. Silly?

MRS. PEARCE [at the door] Now, Mr. Higgins, please don’t say anything

to make the girl conceited about herself.

HIGGINS [conscientiously] Oh! Quite right, Mrs. Pearce. [To Eliza] Yes:

damned silly.

MRS. PEARCE. Please, sir.

HIGGINS [correcting himself] I mean extremely silly.

LIZA. I should look all right with my hat on. [She takes up her hat;

puts it on; and walks across the room to the fireplace with a

fashionable air].

HIGGINS. A new fashion, by George! And it ought to look horrible!

DOOLITTLE [with fatherly pride] Well, I never thought she’d clean up as

good looking as that, Governor. She’s a credit to me, ain’t she?

LIZA. I tell you, it’s easy to clean up here. Hot and cold water on

tap, just as much as you like, there is. Woolly towels, there is; and a

towel horse so hot, it burns your fingers. Soft brushes to scrub

yourself, and a wooden bowl of soap smelling like primroses. Now I know

why ladies is so clean. Washing’s a treat for them. Wish they saw what

it is for the like of me!

HIGGINS. I’m glad the bath-room met with your approval.

LIZA. It didn’t: not all of it; and I don’t care who hears me say it.

Mrs. Pearce knows.

HIGGINS. What was wrong, Mrs. Pearce?

MRS. PEARCE [blandly] Oh, nothing, sir. It doesn’t matter.

LIZA. I had a good mind to break it. I didn’t know which way to look.

But I hung a towel over it, I did.

HIGGINS. Over what?

MRS. PEARCE. Over the looking-glass, sir.

HIGGINS. Doolittle: you have brought your daughter up too strictly.

DOOLITTLE. Me! I never brought her up at all, except to give her a lick

of a strap now and again. Don’t put it on me, Governor. She ain’t

accustomed to it, you see: that’s all. But she’ll soon pick up your

free-and-easy ways.

LIZA. I’m a good girl, I am; and I won’t pick up no free and easy ways.

HIGGINS. Eliza: if you say again that you’re a good girl, your father

shall take you home.

LIZA. Not him. You don’t know my father. All he come here for was to

touch you for some money to get drunk on.

DOOLITTLE. Well, what else would I want money for? To put into the

plate in church, I suppose. [She puts out her tongue at him. He is so

incensed by this that Pickering presently finds it necessary to step

between them]. Don’t you give me none of your lip; and don’t let me

hear you giving this gentleman any of it neither, or you’ll hear from

me about it. See?

HIGGINS. Have you any further advice to give her before you go,

Doolittle? Your blessing, for instance.

DOOLITTLE. No, Governor: I ain’t such a mug as to put up my children to

all I know myself. Hard enough to hold them in without that. If you

want Eliza’s mind improved, Governor, you do it yourself with a strap.

So long, gentlemen. [He turns to go].

HIGGINS [impressively] Stop. You’ll come regularly to see your

daughter. It’s your duty, you know. My brother is a clergyman; and he

could help you in your talks with her.

DOOLITTLE [evasively] Certainly. I’ll come, Governor. Not just this

week, because I have a job at a distance. But later on you may depend

on me. Afternoon, gentlemen. Afternoon, ma’am. [He takes off his hat to

Mrs. Pearce, who disdains the salutation and goes out. He winks at

Higgins, thinking him probably a fellow sufferer from Mrs. Pearce’s

difficult disposition, and follows her].

LIZA. Don’t you believe the old liar. He’d as soon you set a bull-dog

on him as a clergyman. You won’t see him again in a hurry.

HIGGINS. I don’t want to, Eliza. Do you?

LIZA. Not me. I don’t want never to see him again, I don’t. He’s a

disgrace to me, he is, collecting dust, instead of working at his trade.

PICKERING. What is his trade, Eliza?

LIZA. Talking money out of other people’s pockets into his own. His

proper trade’s a navvy; and he works at it sometimes too—for

exercise—and earns good money at it. Ain’t you going to call me Miss

Doolittle any more?

PICKERING. I beg your pardon, Miss Doolittle. It was a slip of the

tongue.

LIZA. Oh, I don’t mind; only it sounded so genteel. I should just like

to take a taxi to the corner of Tottenham Court Road and get out there

and tell it to wait for me, just to put the girls in their place a bit.

I wouldn’t speak to them, you know.

PICKERING. Better wait til we get you something really fashionable.

HIGGINS. Besides, you shouldn’t cut your old friends now that you have

risen in the world. That’s what we call snobbery.

LIZA. You don’t call the like of them my friends now, I should hope.

They’ve took it out of me often enough with their ridicule when they

had the chance; and now I mean to get a bit of my own back. But if I’m

to have fashionable clothes, I’ll wait. I should like to have some.

Mrs. Pearce says you’re going to give me some to wear in bed at night

different to what I wear in the daytime; but it do seem a waste of

money when you could get something to show. Besides, I never could

fancy changing into cold things on a winter night.

MRS. PEARCE [coming back] Now, Eliza. The new things have come for you

to try on.

LIZA. Ah—ow—oo—ooh! [She rushes out].

MRS. PEARCE [following her] Oh, don’t rush about like that, girl [She

shuts the door behind her].

HIGGINS. Pickering: we have taken on a stiff job.

PICKERING [with conviction] Higgins: we have.

ACT III

It is Mrs. Higgins’s at-home day. Nobody has yet arrived. Her

drawing-room, in a flat on Chelsea embankment, has three windows

looking on the river; and the ceiling is not so lofty as it would be in

an older house of the same pretension. The windows are open, giving

access to a balcony with flowers in pots. If you stand with your face

to the windows, you have the fireplace on your left and the door in the

right-hand wall close to the corner nearest the windows.

Mrs. Higgins was brought up on Morris and Burne Jones; and her room,

which is very unlike her son’s room in Wimpole Street, is not crowded

with furniture and little tables and nicknacks. In the middle of the

room there is a big ottoman; and this, with the carpet, the Morris

wall-papers, and the Morris chintz window curtains and brocade covers

of the ottoman and its cushions, supply all the ornament, and are much

too handsome to be hidden by odds and ends of useless things. A few

good oil-paintings from the exhibitions in the Grosvenor Gallery thirty

years ago (the Burne Jones, not the Whistler side of them) are on the

walls. The only landscape is a Cecil Lawson on the scale of a Rubens.

There is a portrait of Mrs. Higgins as she was when she defied fashion

in her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes which, when

caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of

popular estheticism in the eighteen-seventies.

In the corner diagonally opposite the door Mrs. Higgins, now over sixty

and long past taking the trouble to dress out of the fashion, sits

writing at an elegantly simple writing-table with a bell button within

reach of her hand. There is a Chippendale chair further back in the

room between her and the window nearest her side. At the other side of

the room, further forward, is an Elizabethan chair roughly carved in

the taste of Inigo Jones. On the same side a piano in a decorated case.

The corner between the fireplace and the window is occupied by a divan

cushioned in Morris chintz.

It is between four and five in the afternoon.

The door is opened violently; and Higgins enters with his hat on.

MRS. HIGGINS [dismayed] Henry [scolding him]! What are you doing here

to-day? It is my at home day: you promised not to come. [As he bends to

kiss her, she takes his hat off, and presents it to him].

HIGGINS. Oh bother! [He throws the hat down on the table].

MRS. HIGGINS. Go home at once.

HIGGINS [kissing her] I know, mother. I came on purpose.

MRS. HIGGINS. But you mustn’t. I’m serious, Henry. You offend all my

friends: they stop coming whenever they meet you.

HIGGINS. Nonsense! I know I have no small talk; but people don’t mind.

[He sits on the settee].

MRS. HIGGINS. Oh! don’t they? Small talk indeed! What about your large

talk? Really, dear, you mustn’t stay.

HIGGINS. I must. I’ve a job for you. A phonetic job.

MRS. HIGGINS. No use, dear. I’m sorry; but I can’t get round your

vowels; and though I like to get pretty postcards in your patent

shorthand, I always have to read the copies in ordinary writing you so

thoughtfully send me.

HIGGINS. Well, this isn’t a phonetic job.

MRS. HIGGINS. You said it was.

HIGGINS. Not your part of it. I’ve picked up a girl.

MRS. HIGGINS. Does that mean that some girl has picked you up?

HIGGINS. Not at all. I don’t mean a love affair.

MRS. HIGGINS. What a pity!

HIGGINS. Why?

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, you never fall in love with anyone under

forty-five. When will you discover that there are some rather

nice-looking young women about?

HIGGINS. Oh, I can’t be bothered with young women. My idea of a

loveable woman is something as like you as possible. I shall never get

into the way of seriously liking young women: some habits lie too deep

to be changed. [Rising abruptly and walking about, jingling his money

and his keys in his trouser pockets] Besides, they’re all idiots.

MRS. HIGGINS. Do you know what you would do if you really loved me,

Henry?

HIGGINS. Oh bother! What? Marry, I suppose?

MRS. HIGGINS. No. Stop fidgeting and take your hands out of your

pockets. [With a gesture of despair, he obeys and sits down again].

That’s a good boy. Now tell me about the girl.

HIGGINS. She’s coming to see you.

MRS. HIGGINS. I don’t remember asking her.

HIGGINS. You didn’t. I asked her. If you’d known her you wouldn’t have

asked her.

MRS. HIGGINS. Indeed! Why?

HIGGINS. Well, it’s like this. She’s a common flower girl. I picked her

off the kerbstone.

MRS. HIGGINS. And invited her to my at-home!

HIGGINS [rising and coming to her to coax her] Oh, that’ll be all

right. I’ve taught her to speak properly; and she has strict orders as

to her behavior. She’s to keep to two subjects: the weather and

everybody’s health—Fine day and How do you do, you know—and not to

let herself go on things in general. That will be safe.

MRS. HIGGINS. Safe! To talk about our health! about our insides!

perhaps about our outsides! How could you be so silly, Henry?

HIGGINS [impatiently] Well, she must talk about something. [He controls

himself and sits down again]. Oh, she’ll be all right: don’t you fuss.

Pickering is in it with me. I’ve a sort of bet on that I’ll pass her

off as a duchess in six months. I started on her some months ago; and

she’s getting on like a house on fire. I shall win my bet. She has a

quick ear; and she’s been easier to teach than my middle-class pupils

because she’s had to learn a complete new language. She talks English

almost as you talk French.

MRS. HIGGINS. That’s satisfactory, at all events.

HIGGINS. Well, it is and it isn’t.

MRS. HIGGINS. What does that mean?

HIGGINS. You see, I’ve got her pronunciation all right; but you have to

consider not only how a girl pronounces, but what she pronounces; and

that’s where—

They are interrupted by the parlor-maid, announcing guests.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mrs. and Miss Eynsford Hill. [She withdraws].

HIGGINS. Oh Lord! [He rises; snatches his hat from the table; and makes

for the door; but before he reaches it his mother introduces him].

Mrs. and Miss Eynsford Hill are the mother and daughter who sheltered

from the rain in Covent Garden. The mother is well bred, quiet, and has

the habitual anxiety of straitened means. The daughter has acquired a

gay air of being very much at home in society: the bravado of genteel

poverty.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Mrs. Higgins] How do you do? [They shake hands].

MISS EYNSFORD HILL. How d’you do? [She shakes].

MRS. HIGGINS [introducing] My son Henry.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Your celebrated son! I have so longed to meet you,

Professor Higgins.

HIGGINS [glumly, making no movement in her direction] Delighted. [He

backs against the piano and bows brusquely].

Miss EYNSFORD HILL [going to him with confident familiarity] How do you

do?

HIGGINS [staring at her] I’ve seen you before somewhere. I haven’t the

ghost of a notion where; but I’ve heard your voice. [Drearily] It

doesn’t matter. You’d better sit down.

MRS. HIGGINS. I’m sorry to say that my celebrated son has no manners.

You mustn’t mind him.

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [gaily] I don’t. [She sits in the Elizabethan chair].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [a little bewildered] Not at all. [She sits on the

ottoman between her daughter and Mrs. Higgins, who has turned her chair

away from the writing-table].

HIGGINS. Oh, have I been rude? I didn’t mean to be. [He goes to the

central window, through which, with his back to the company, he

contemplates the river and the flowers in Battersea Park on the

opposite bank as if they were a frozen dessert.]

The parlor-maid returns, ushering in Pickering.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Colonel Pickering [She withdraws].

PICKERING. How do you do, Mrs. Higgins?

MRS. HIGGINS. So glad you’ve come. Do you know Mrs. Eynsford Hill—Miss

Eynsford Hill? [Exchange of bows. The Colonel brings the Chippendale

chair a little forward between Mrs. Hill and Mrs. Higgins, and sits

down].

PICKERING. Has Henry told you what we’ve come for?

HIGGINS [over his shoulder] We were interrupted: damn it!

MRS. HIGGINS. Oh Henry, Henry, really!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [half rising] Are we in the way?

MRS. HIGGINS [rising and making her sit down again] No, no. You

couldn’t have come more fortunately: we want you to meet a friend of

ours.

HIGGINS [turning hopefully] Yes, by George! We want two or three

people. You’ll do as well as anybody else.

The parlor-maid returns, ushering Freddy.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mr. Eynsford Hill.

HIGGINS [almost audibly, past endurance] God of Heaven! another of them.

FREDDY [shaking hands with Mrs. Higgins] Ahdedo?

MRS. HIGGINS. Very good of you to come. [Introducing] Colonel Pickering.

FREDDY [bowing] Ahdedo?

MRS. HIGGINS. I don’t think you know my son, Professor Higgins.

FREDDY [going to Higgins] Ahdedo?

HIGGINS [looking at him much as if he were a pickpocket] I’ll take my

oath I’ve met you before somewhere. Where was it?

FREDDY. I don’t think so.

HIGGINS [resignedly] It don’t matter, anyhow. Sit down. He shakes

Freddy’s hand, and almost slings him on the ottoman with his face to

the windows; then comes round to the other side of it.

HIGGINS. Well, here we are, anyhow! [He sits down on the ottoman next

Mrs. Eynsford Hill, on her left.] And now, what the devil are we going

to talk about until Eliza comes?

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry: you are the life and soul of the Royal Society’s

soirees; but really you’re rather trying on more commonplace occasions.

HIGGINS. Am I? Very sorry. [Beaming suddenly] I suppose I am, you know.

[Uproariously] Ha, ha!

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [who considers Higgins quite eligible matrimonially]

I sympathize. I haven’t any small talk. If people would only be frank

and say what they really think!

HIGGINS [relapsing into gloom] Lord forbid!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [taking up her daughter’s cue] But why?

HIGGINS. What they think they ought to think is bad enough, Lord knows;

but what they really think would break up the whole show. Do you

suppose it would be really agreeable if I were to come out now with

what I really think?

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [gaily] Is it so very cynical?

HIGGINS. Cynical! Who the dickens said it was cynical? I mean it

wouldn’t be decent.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [seriously] Oh! I’m sure you don’t mean that, Mr.

Higgins.

HIGGINS. You see, we’re all savages, more or less. We’re supposed to be

civilized and cultured—to know all about poetry and philosophy and art

and science, and so on; but how many of us know even the meanings of

these names? [To Miss Hill] What do you know of poetry? [To Mrs. Hill]

What do you know of science? [Indicating Freddy] What does he know of

art or science or anything else? What the devil do you imagine I know

of philosophy?

MRS. HIGGINS [warningly] Or of manners, Henry?

THE PARLOR-MAID [opening the door] Miss Doolittle. [She withdraws].

HIGGINS [rising hastily and running to Mrs. Higgins] Here she is,

mother. [He stands on tiptoe and makes signs over his mother’s head to

Eliza to indicate to her which lady is her hostess].

Eliza, who is exquisitely dressed, produces an impression of such

remarkable distinction and beauty as she enters that they all rise,

quite flustered. Guided by Higgins’s signals, she comes to Mrs. Higgins

with studied grace.

LIZA [speaking with pedantic correctness of pronunciation and great

beauty of tone] How do you do, Mrs. Higgins? [She gasps slightly in

making sure of the H in Higgins, but is quite successful]. Mr. Higgins

told me I might come.

MRS. HIGGINS [cordially] Quite right: I’m very glad indeed to see you.

PICKERING. How do you do, Miss Doolittle?

LIZA [shaking hands with him] Colonel Pickering, is it not?

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I feel sure we have met before, Miss Doolittle. I

remember your eyes.

LIZA. How do you do? [She sits down on the ottoman gracefully in the

place just left vacant by Higgins].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [introducing] My daughter Clara.

LIZA. How do you do?

CLARA [impulsively] How do you do? [She sits down on the ottoman beside

Eliza, devouring her with her eyes].

FREDDY [coming to their side of the ottoman] I’ve certainly had the

pleasure.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [introducing] My son Freddy.

LIZA. How do you do?

Freddy bows and sits down in the Elizabethan chair, infatuated.

HIGGINS [suddenly] By George, yes: it all comes back to me! [They stare

at him]. Covent Garden! [Lamentably] What a damned thing!

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry, please! [He is about to sit on the edge of the

table]. Don’t sit on my writing-table: you’ll break it.

HIGGINS [sulkily] Sorry.

He goes to the divan, stumbling into the fender and over the fire-irons

on his way; extricating himself with muttered imprecations; and

finishing his disastrous journey by throwing himself so impatiently on

the divan that he almost breaks it. Mrs. Higgins looks at him, but

controls herself and says nothing.

A long and painful pause ensues.

MRS. HIGGINS [at last, conversationally] Will it rain, do you think?

LIZA. The shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely to

move slowly in an easterly direction. There are no indications of any

great change in the barometrical situation.

FREDDY. Ha! ha! how awfully funny!

LIZA. What is wrong with that, young man? I bet I got it right.

FREDDY. Killing!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I’m sure I hope it won’t turn cold. There’s so much

influenza about. It runs right through our whole family regularly every

spring.

LIZA [darkly] My aunt died of influenza: so they said.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [clicks her tongue sympathetically]!!!

LIZA [in the same tragic tone] But it’s my belief they done the old

woman in.

MRS. HIGGINS [puzzled] Done her in?

LIZA. Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die of influenza? She

come through diphtheria right enough the year before. I saw her with my

own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was. They all thought she was dead;

but my father he kept ladling gin down her throat til she came to so

sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [startled] Dear me!

LIZA [piling up the indictment] What call would a woman with that

strength in her have to die of influenza? What become of her new straw

hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say

is, them as pinched it done her in.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. What does doing her in mean?

HIGGINS [hastily] Oh, that’s the new small talk. To do a person in

means to kill them.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Eliza, horrified] You surely don’t believe that

your aunt was killed?

LIZA. Do I not! Them she lived with would have killed her for a

hat-pin, let alone a hat.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. But it can’t have been right for your father to

pour spirits down her throat like that. It might have killed her.

LIZA. Not her. Gin was mother’s milk to her. Besides, he’d poured so

much down his own throat that he knew the good of it.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Do you mean that he drank?

LIZA. Drank! My word! Something chronic.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. How dreadful for you!

LIZA. Not a bit. It never did him no harm what I could see. But then he

did not keep it up regular. [Cheerfully] On the burst, as you might

say, from time to time. And always more agreeable when he had a drop

in. When he was out of work, my mother used to give him fourpence and

tell him to go out and not come back until he’d drunk himself cheerful

and loving-like. There’s lots of women has to make their husbands drunk

to make them fit to live with. [Now quite at her ease] You see, it’s

like this. If a man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when

he’s sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop of booze just

takes that off and makes him happy. [To Freddy, who is in convulsions

of suppressed laughter] Here! what are you sniggering at?

FREDDY. The new small talk. You do it so awfully well.

LIZA. If I was doing it proper, what was you laughing at? [To Higgins]

Have I said anything I oughtn’t?

MRS. HIGGINS [interposing] Not at all, Miss Doolittle.

LIZA. Well, that’s a mercy, anyhow. [Expansively] What I always say is—

HIGGINS [rising and looking at his watch] Ahem!

LIZA [looking round at him; taking the hint; and rising] Well: I must

go. [They all rise. Freddy goes to the door]. So pleased to have met

you. Good-bye. [She shakes hands with Mrs. Higgins].

MRS. HIGGINS. Good-bye.

LIZA. Good-bye, Colonel Pickering.

PICKERING. Good-bye, Miss Doolittle. [They shake hands].

LIZA [nodding to the others] Good-bye, all.

FREDDY [opening the door for her] Are you walking across the Park, Miss

Doolittle? If so—

LIZA. Walk! Not bloody likely. [Sensation]. I am going in a taxi. [She

goes out].

Pickering gasps and sits down. Freddy goes out on the balcony to catch

another glimpse of Eliza.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [suffering from shock] Well, I really can’t get used

to the new ways.

CLARA [throwing herself discontentedly into the Elizabethan chair]. Oh,

it’s all right, mamma, quite right. People will think we never go

anywhere or see anybody if you are so old-fashioned.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I daresay I am very old-fashioned; but I do hope

you won’t begin using that expression, Clara. I have got accustomed to

hear you talking about men as rotters, and calling everything filthy

and beastly; though I do think it horrible and unladylike. But this

last is really too much. Don’t you think so, Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. Don’t ask me. I’ve been away in India for several years; and

manners have changed so much that I sometimes don’t know whether I’m at

a respectable dinner-table or in a ship’s forecastle.

CLARA. It’s all a matter of habit. There’s no right or wrong in it.

Nobody means anything by it. And it’s so quaint, and gives such a smart

emphasis to things that are not in themselves very witty. I find the

new small talk delightful and quite innocent.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [rising] Well, after that, I think it’s time for us

to go.

Pickering and Higgins rise.

CLARA [rising] Oh yes: we have three at homes to go to still. Good-bye,

Mrs. Higgins. Good-bye, Colonel Pickering. Good-bye, Professor Higgins.

HIGGINS [coming grimly at her from the divan, and accompanying her to

the door] Good-bye. Be sure you try on that small talk at the three

at-homes. Don’t be nervous about it. Pitch it in strong.

CLARA [all smiles] I will. Good-bye. Such nonsense, all this early

Victorian prudery!

HIGGINS [tempting her] Such damned nonsense!

CLARA. Such bloody nonsense!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [convulsively] Clara!

CLARA. Ha! ha! [She goes out radiant, conscious of being thoroughly up

to date, and is heard descending the stairs in a stream of silvery

laughter].

FREDDY [to the heavens at large] Well, I ask you [He gives it up, and

comes to Mrs. Higgins]. Good-bye.

MRS. HIGGINS [shaking hands] Good-bye. Would you like to meet Miss

Doolittle again?

FREDDY [eagerly] Yes, I should, most awfully.

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, you know my days.

FREDDY. Yes. Thanks awfully. Good-bye. [He goes out].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Good-bye, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Good-bye. Good-bye.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Pickering] It’s no use. I shall never be able to

bring myself to use that word.

PICKERING. Don’t. It’s not compulsory, you know. You’ll get on quite

well without it.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Only, Clara is so down on me if I am not positively

reeking with the latest slang. Good-bye.

PICKERING. Good-bye [They shake hands].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Mrs. Higgins] You mustn’t mind Clara.

[Pickering, catching from her lowered tone that this is not meant for

him to hear, discreetly joins Higgins at the window]. We’re so poor!

and she gets so few parties, poor child! She doesn’t quite know. [Mrs.

Higgins, seeing that her eyes are moist, takes her hand sympathetically

and goes with her to the door]. But the boy is nice. Don’t you think so?

MRS. HIGGINS. Oh, quite nice. I shall always be delighted to see him.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Thank you, dear. Good-bye. [She goes out].

HIGGINS [eagerly] Well? Is Eliza presentable [he swoops on his mother

and drags her to the ottoman, where she sits down in Eliza’s place with

her son on her left]?

Pickering returns to his chair on her right.

MRS. HIGGINS. You silly boy, of course she’s not presentable. She’s a

triumph of your art and of her dressmaker’s; but if you suppose for a

moment that she doesn’t give herself away in every sentence she utters,

you must be perfectly cracked about her.

PICKERING. But don’t you think something might be done? I mean

something to eliminate the sanguinary element from her conversation.

MRS. HIGGINS. Not as long as she is in Henry’s hands.

HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?

MRS. HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper—say on a canal

barge; but it would not be proper for her at a garden party.

HIGGINS [deeply injured] Well I must say—

PICKERING [interrupting him] Come, Higgins: you must learn to know

yourself. I haven’t heard such language as yours since we used to

review the volunteers in Hyde Park twenty years ago.

HIGGINS [sulkily] Oh, well, if you say so, I suppose I don’t always

talk like a bishop.

MRS. HIGGINS [quieting Henry with a touch] Colonel Pickering: will you

tell me what is the exact state of things in Wimpole Street?

PICKERING [cheerfully: as if this completely changed the subject] Well,

I have come to live there with Henry. We work together at my Indian

Dialects; and we think it more convenient—

MRS. HIGGINS. Quite so. I know all about that: it’s an excellent

arrangement. But where does this girl live?

HIGGINS. With us, of course. Where would she live?

MRS. HIGGINS. But on what terms? Is she a servant? If not, what is she?

PICKERING [slowly] I think I know what you mean, Mrs. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Well, dash me if I do! I’ve had to work at the girl every day

for months to get her to her present pitch. Besides, she’s useful. She

knows where my things are, and remembers my appointments and so forth.

MRS. HIGGINS. How does your housekeeper get on with her?

HIGGINS. Mrs. Pearce? Oh, she’s jolly glad to get so much taken off her

hands; for before Eliza came, she had to have to find things and remind

me of my appointments. But she’s got some silly bee in her bonnet about

Eliza. She keeps saying “You don’t think, sir”: doesn’t she, Pick?

PICKERING. Yes: that’s the formula. “You don’t think, sir.” That’s the

end of every conversation about Eliza.

HIGGINS. As if I ever stop thinking about the girl and her confounded

vowels and consonants. I’m worn out, thinking about her, and watching

her lips and her teeth and her tongue, not to mention her soul, which

is the quaintest of the lot.

MRS. HIGGINS. You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with

your live doll.

HIGGINS. Playing! The hardest job I ever tackled: make no mistake about

that, mother. But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to

take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by

creating a new speech for her. It’s filling up the deepest gulf that

separates class from class and soul from soul.

PICKERING [drawing his chair closer to Mrs. Higgins and bending over to

her eagerly] Yes: it’s enormously interesting. I assure you, Mrs.

Higgins, we take Eliza very seriously. Every week—every day

almost—there is some new change. [Closer again] We keep records of

every stage—dozens of gramophone disks and photographs—

HIGGINS [assailing her at the other ear] Yes, by George: it’s the most

absorbing experiment I ever tackled. She regularly fills our lives up;

doesn’t she, Pick?

PICKERING. We’re always talking Eliza.

HIGGINS. Teaching Eliza.

PICKERING. Dressing Eliza.

MRS. HIGGINS. What!

HIGGINS. Inventing new Elizas.

Higgins and Pickering, speaking together:

HIGGINS. You know, she has the most extraordinary quickness of ear:

PICKERING. I assure you, my dear Mrs. Higgins, that girl

HIGGINS. just like a parrot. I’ve tried her with every

PICKERING. is a genius. She can play the piano quite beautifully

HIGGINS. possible sort of sound that a human being can make—

PICKERING. We have taken her to classical concerts and to music

HIGGINS. Continental dialects, African dialects, Hottentot

PICKERING. halls; and it’s all the same to her: she plays everything

HIGGINS. clicks, things it took me years to get hold of; and

PICKERING. she hears right off when she comes home, whether it’s

HIGGINS. she picks them up like a shot, right away, as if she had

PICKERING. Beethoven and Brahms or Lehar and Lionel Morickton;

HIGGINS. been at it all her life.

PICKERING. though six months ago, she’d never as much as touched

a piano.

MRS. HIGGINS [putting her fingers in her ears, as they are by this time

shouting one another down with an intolerable noise] Sh—sh—sh—sh!

[They stop].

PICKERING. I beg your pardon. [He draws his chair back apologetically].

HIGGINS. Sorry. When Pickering starts shouting nobody can get a word in

edgeways.

MRS. HIGGINS. Be quiet, Henry. Colonel Pickering: don’t you realize

that when Eliza walked into Wimpole Street, something walked in with

her?

PICKERING. Her father did. But Henry soon got rid of him.

MRS. HIGGINS. It would have been more to the point if her mother had.

But as her mother didn’t something else did.

PICKERING. But what?

MRS. HIGGINS [unconsciously dating herself by the word] A problem.

PICKERING. Oh, I see. The problem of how to pass her off as a lady.

HIGGINS. I’ll solve that problem. I’ve half solved it already.

MRS. HIGGINS. No, you two infinitely stupid male creatures: the problem

of what is to be done with her afterwards.

HIGGINS. I don’t see anything in that. She can go her own way, with all

the advantages I have given her.

MRS. HIGGINS. The advantages of that poor woman who was here just now!

The manners and habits that disqualify a fine lady from earning her own

living without giving her a fine lady’s income! Is that what you mean?

PICKERING [indulgently, being rather bored] Oh, that will be all right,

Mrs. Higgins. [He rises to go].

HIGGINS [rising also] We’ll find her some light employment.

PICKERING. She’s happy enough. Don’t you worry about her. Good-bye. [He

shakes hands as if he were consoling a frightened child, and makes for

the door].

HIGGINS. Anyhow, there’s no good bothering now. The thing’s done.

Good-bye, mother. [He kisses her, and follows Pickering].

PICKERING [turning for a final consolation] There are plenty of

openings. We’ll do what’s right. Good-bye.

HIGGINS [to Pickering as they go out together] Let’s take her to the

Shakespear exhibition at Earls Court.

PICKERING. Yes: let’s. Her remarks will be delicious.

HIGGINS. She’ll mimic all the people for us when we get home.

PICKERING. Ripping. [Both are heard laughing as they go downstairs].

MRS. HIGGINS [rises with an impatient bounce, and returns to her work

at the writing-table. She sweeps a litter of disarranged papers out of

her way; snatches a sheet of paper from her stationery case; and tries

resolutely to write. At the third line she gives it up; flings down her

pen; grips the table angrily and exclaims] Oh, men! men!! men!!!

ACT IV

The Wimpole Street laboratory. Midnight. Nobody in the room. The clock

on the mantelpiece strikes twelve. The fire is not alight: it is a

summer night.

Presently Higgins and Pickering are heard on the stairs.

HIGGINS [calling down to Pickering] I say, Pick: lock up, will you. I

shan’t be going out again.

PICKERING. Right. Can Mrs. Pearce go to bed? We don’t want anything

more, do we?

HIGGINS. Lord, no!

Eliza opens the door and is seen on the lighted landing in opera cloak,

brilliant evening dress, and diamonds, with fan, flowers, and all

accessories. She comes to the hearth, and switches on the electric

lights there. She is tired: her pallor contrasts strongly with her dark

eyes and hair; and her expression is almost tragic. She takes off her

cloak; puts her fan and flowers on the piano; and sits down on the

bench, brooding and silent. Higgins, in evening dress, with overcoat

and hat, comes in, carrying a smoking jacket which he has picked up

downstairs. He takes off the hat and overcoat; throws them carelessly

on the newspaper stand; disposes of his coat in the same way; puts on

the smoking jacket; and throws himself wearily into the easy-chair at

the hearth. Pickering, similarly attired, comes in. He also takes off

his hat and overcoat, and is about to throw them on Higgins’s when he

hesitates.

PICKERING. I say: Mrs. Pearce will row if we leave these things lying

about in the drawing-room.

HIGGINS. Oh, chuck them over the bannisters into the hall. She’ll find

them there in the morning and put them away all right. She’ll think we

were drunk.

PICKERING. We are, slightly. Are there any letters?

HIGGINS. I didn’t look. [Pickering takes the overcoats and hats and

goes down stairs. Higgins begins half singing half yawning an air from

La Fanciulla del Golden West. Suddenly he stops and exclaims] I wonder

where the devil my slippers are!

Eliza looks at him darkly; then leaves the room.

Higgins yawns again, and resumes his song. Pickering returns, with the

contents of the letter-box in his hand.

PICKERING. Only circulars, and this coroneted billet-doux for you. [He

throws the circulars into the fender, and posts himself on the

hearthrug, with his back to the grate].

HIGGINS [glancing at the billet-doux] Money-lender. [He throws the

letter after the circulars].

Eliza returns with a pair of large down-at-heel slippers. She places

them on the carpet before Higgins, and sits as before without a word.

HIGGINS [yawning again] Oh Lord! What an evening! What a crew! What a

silly tomfoollery! [He raises his shoe to unlace it, and catches sight

of the slippers. He stops unlacing and looks at them as if they had

appeared there of their own accord]. Oh! they’re there, are they?

PICKERING [stretching himself] Well, I feel a bit tired. It’s been a

long day. The garden party, a dinner party, and the opera! Rather too

much of a good thing. But you’ve won your bet, Higgins. Eliza did the

trick, and something to spare, eh?

HIGGINS [fervently] Thank God it’s over!

Eliza flinches violently; but they take no notice of her; and she

recovers herself and sits stonily as before.

PICKERING. Were you nervous at the garden party? I was. Eliza didn’t

seem a bit nervous.

HIGGINS. Oh, she wasn’t nervous. I knew she’d be all right. No, it’s

the strain of putting the job through all these months that has told on

me. It was interesting enough at first, while we were at the phonetics;

but after that I got deadly sick of it. If I hadn’t backed myself to do

it I should have chucked the whole thing up two months ago. It was a

silly notion: the whole thing has been a bore.

PICKERING. Oh come! the garden party was frightfully exciting. My heart

began beating like anything.

HIGGINS. Yes, for the first three minutes. But when I saw we were going

to win hands down, I felt like a bear in a cage, hanging about doing

nothing. The dinner was worse: sitting gorging there for over an hour,

with nobody but a damned fool of a fashionable woman to talk to! I tell

you, Pickering, never again for me. No more artificial duchesses. The

whole thing has been simple purgatory.

PICKERING. You’ve never been broken in properly to the social routine.

[Strolling over to the piano] I rather enjoy dipping into it

occasionally myself: it makes me feel young again. Anyhow, it was a

great success: an immense success. I was quite frightened once or twice

because Eliza was doing it so well. You see, lots of the real people

can’t do it at all: they’re such fools that they think style comes by

nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There’s

always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.

HIGGINS. Yes: that’s what drives me mad: the silly people don’t know

their own silly business. [Rising] However, it’s over and done with;

and now I can go to bed at last without dreading tomorrow.

Eliza’s beauty becomes murderous.

PICKERING. I think I shall turn in too. Still, it’s been a great

occasion: a triumph for you. Good-night. [He goes].

HIGGINS [following him] Good-night. [Over his shoulder, at the door]

Put out the lights, Eliza; and tell Mrs. Pearce not to make coffee for

me in the morning: I’ll take tea. [He goes out].

Eliza tries to control herself and feel indifferent as she rises and

walks across to the hearth to switch off the lights. By the time she

gets there she is on the point of screaming. She sits down in Higgins’s

chair and holds on hard to the arms. Finally she gives way and flings

herself furiously on the floor raging.

HIGGINS [in despairing wrath outside] What the devil have I done with

my slippers? [He appears at the door].

LIZA [snatching up the slippers, and hurling them at him one after the

other with all her force] There are your slippers. And there. Take your

slippers; and may you never have a day’s luck with them!

HIGGINS [astounded] What on earth—! [He comes to her]. What’s the

matter? Get up. [He pulls her up]. Anything wrong?

LIZA [breathless] Nothing wrong—with YOU. I’ve won your bet for you,

haven’t I? That’s enough for you. _I_ don’t matter, I suppose.

HIGGINS. YOU won my bet! You! Presumptuous insect! _I_ won it. What did

you throw those slippers at me for?

LIZA. Because I wanted to smash your face. I’d like to kill you, you

selfish brute. Why didn’t you leave me where you picked me out of—in

the gutter? You thank God it’s all over, and that now you can throw me

back again there, do you? [She crisps her fingers, frantically].

HIGGINS [looking at her in cool wonder] The creature IS nervous, after

all.

LIZA [gives a suffocated scream of fury, and instinctively darts her

nails at his face]!!

HIGGINS [catching her wrists] Ah! would you? Claws in, you cat. How

dare you show your temper to me? Sit down and be quiet. [He throws her

roughly into the easy-chair].

LIZA [crushed by superior strength and weight] What’s to become of me?

What’s to become of me?

HIGGINS. How the devil do I know what’s to become of you? What does it

matter what becomes of you?

LIZA. You don’t care. I know you don’t care. You wouldn’t care if I was

dead. I’m nothing to you—not so much as them slippers.

HIGGINS [thundering] THOSE slippers.

LIZA [with bitter submission] Those slippers. I didn’t think it made

any difference now.

A pause. Eliza hopeless and crushed. Higgins a little uneasy.

HIGGINS [in his loftiest manner] Why have you begun going on like this?

May I ask whether you complain of your treatment here?

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. Has anybody behaved badly to you? Colonel Pickering? Mrs.

Pearce? Any of the servants?

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. I presume you don’t pretend that I have treated you badly.

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. I am glad to hear it. [He moderates his tone]. Perhaps you’re

tired after the strain of the day. Will you have a glass of champagne?

[He moves towards the door].

LIZA. No. [Recollecting her manners] Thank you.

HIGGINS [good-humored again] This has been coming on you for some days.

I suppose it was natural for you to be anxious about the garden party.

But that’s all over now. [He pats her kindly on the shoulder. She

writhes]. There’s nothing more to worry about.

LIZA. No. Nothing more for you to worry about. [She suddenly rises and

gets away from him by going to the piano bench, where she sits and

hides her face]. Oh God! I wish I was dead.

HIGGINS [staring after her in sincere surprise] Why? in heaven’s name,

why? [Reasonably, going to her] Listen to me, Eliza. All this

irritation is purely subjective.

LIZA. I don’t understand. I’m too ignorant.

HIGGINS. It’s only imagination. Low spirits and nothing else. Nobody’s

hurting you. Nothing’s wrong. You go to bed like a good girl and sleep

it off. Have a little cry and say your prayers: that will make you

comfortable.

LIZA. I heard YOUR prayers. “Thank God it’s all over!”

HIGGINS [impatiently] Well, don’t you thank God it’s all over? Now you

are free and can do what you like.

LIZA [pulling herself together in desperation] What am I fit for? What

have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What’s to

become of me?

HIGGINS [enlightened, but not at all impressed] Oh, that’s what’s

worrying you, is it? [He thrusts his hands into his pockets, and walks

about in his usual manner, rattling the contents of his pockets, as if

condescending to a trivial subject out of pure kindness]. I shouldn’t

bother about it if I were you. I should imagine you won’t have much

difficulty in settling yourself, somewhere or other, though I hadn’t

quite realized that you were going away. [She looks quickly at him: he

does not look at her, but examines the dessert stand on the piano and

decides that he will eat an apple]. You might marry, you know. [He

bites a large piece out of the apple, and munches it noisily]. You see,

Eliza, all men are not confirmed old bachelors like me and the Colonel.

Most men are the marrying sort (poor devils!); and you’re not

bad-looking; it’s quite a pleasure to look at you sometimes—not now,

of course, because you’re crying and looking as ugly as the very devil;

but when you’re all right and quite yourself, you’re what I should call

attractive. That is, to the people in the marrying line, you

understand. You go to bed and have a good nice rest; and then get up

and look at yourself in the glass; and you won’t feel so cheap.

Eliza again looks at him, speechless, and does not stir.

The look is quite lost on him: he eats his apple with a dreamy

expression of happiness, as it is quite a good one.

HIGGINS [a genial afterthought occurring to him] I daresay my mother

could find some chap or other who would do very well—

LIZA. We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.

HIGGINS [waking up] What do you mean?

LIZA. I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of

me I’m not fit to sell anything else. I wish you’d left me where you

found me.

HIGGINS [slinging the core of the apple decisively into the grate]

Tosh, Eliza. Don’t you insult human relations by dragging all this cant

about buying and selling into it. You needn’t marry the fellow if you

don’t like him.

LIZA. What else am I to do?

HIGGINS. Oh, lots of things. What about your old idea of a florist’s

shop? Pickering could set you up in one: he’s lots of money.

[Chuckling] He’ll have to pay for all those togs you have been wearing

today; and that, with the hire of the jewellery, will make a big hole

in two hundred pounds. Why, six months ago you would have thought it

the millennium to have a flower shop of your own. Come! you’ll be all

right. I must clear off to bed: I’m devilish sleepy. By the way, I came

down for something: I forget what it was.

LIZA. Your slippers.

HIGGINS. Oh yes, of course. You shied them at me. [He picks them up,

and is going out when she rises and speaks to him].

LIZA. Before you go, sir—

HIGGINS [dropping the slippers in his surprise at her calling him sir]

Eh?

LIZA. Do my clothes belong to me or to Colonel Pickering?

HIGGINS [coming back into the room as if her question were the very

climax of unreason] What the devil use would they be to Pickering?

LIZA. He might want them for the next girl you pick up to experiment on.

HIGGINS [shocked and hurt] Is THAT the way you feel towards us?

LIZA. I don’t want to hear anything more about that. All I want to know

is whether anything belongs to me. My own clothes were burnt.

HIGGINS. But what does it matter? Why need you start bothering about

that in the middle of the night?

LIZA. I want to know what I may take away with me. I don’t want to be

accused of stealing.

HIGGINS [now deeply wounded] Stealing! You shouldn’t have said that,

Eliza. That shows a want of feeling.

LIZA. I’m sorry. I’m only a common ignorant girl; and in my station I

have to be careful. There can’t be any feelings between the like of you

and the like of me. Please will you tell me what belongs to me and what

doesn’t?

HIGGINS [very sulky] You may take the whole damned houseful if you

like. Except the jewels. They’re hired. Will that satisfy you? [He

turns on his heel and is about to go in extreme dudgeon].

LIZA [drinking in his emotion like nectar, and nagging him to provoke a

further supply] Stop, please. [She takes off her jewels]. Will you take

these to your room and keep them safe? I don’t want to run the risk of

their being missing.

HIGGINS [furious] Hand them over. [She puts them into his hands]. If

these belonged to me instead of to the jeweler, I’d ram them down your

ungrateful throat. [He perfunctorily thrusts them into his pockets,

unconsciously decorating himself with the protruding ends of the

chains].

LIZA [taking a ring off] This ring isn’t the jeweler’s: it’s the one

you bought me in Brighton. I don’t want it now. [Higgins dashes the

ring violently into the fireplace, and turns on her so threateningly

that she crouches over the piano with her hands over her face, and

exclaims] Don’t you hit me.

HIGGINS. Hit you! You infamous creature, how dare you accuse me of such

a thing? It is you who have hit me. You have wounded me to the heart.

LIZA [thrilling with hidden joy] I’m glad. I’ve got a little of my own

back, anyhow.

HIGGINS [with dignity, in his finest professional style] You have

caused me to lose my temper: a thing that has hardly ever happened to

me before. I prefer to say nothing more tonight. I am going to bed.

LIZA [pertly] You’d better leave a note for Mrs. Pearce about the

coffee; for she won’t be told by me.

HIGGINS [formally] Damn Mrs. Pearce; and damn the coffee; and damn you;

and damn my own folly in having lavished MY hard-earned knowledge and

the treasure of my regard and intimacy on a heartless guttersnipe. [He

goes out with impressive decorum, and spoils it by slamming the door

savagely].

Eliza smiles for the first time; expresses her feelings by a wild

pantomime in which an imitation of Higgins’s exit is confused with her

own triumph; and finally goes down on her knees on the hearthrug to

look for the ring.

ACT V

Mrs. Higgins’s drawing-room. She is at her writing-table as before. The

parlor-maid comes in.

THE PARLOR-MAID [at the door] Mr. Henry, mam, is downstairs with

Colonel Pickering.

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, show them up.

THE PARLOR-MAID. They’re using the telephone, mam. Telephoning to the

police, I think.

MRS. HIGGINS. What!

THE PARLOR-MAID [coming further in and lowering her voice] Mr. Henry’s

in a state, mam. I thought I’d better tell you.

MRS. HIGGINS. If you had told me that Mr. Henry was not in a state it

would have been more surprising. Tell them to come up when they’ve

finished with the police. I suppose he’s lost something.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, maam [going].

MRS. HIGGINS. Go upstairs and tell Miss Doolittle that Mr. Henry and

the Colonel are here. Ask her not to come down till I send for her.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, mam.

Higgins bursts in. He is, as the parlor-maid has said, in a state.

HIGGINS. Look here, mother: here’s a confounded thing!

MRS. HIGGINS. Yes, dear. Good-morning. [He checks his impatience and

kisses her, whilst the parlor-maid goes out]. What is it?

HIGGINS. Eliza’s bolted.

MRS. HIGGINS [calmly continuing her writing] You must have frightened

her.

HIGGINS. Frightened her! nonsense! She was left last night, as usual,

to turn out the lights and all that; and instead of going to bed she

changed her clothes and went right off: her bed wasn’t slept in. She

came in a cab for her things before seven this morning; and that fool

Mrs. Pearce let her have them without telling me a word about it. What

am I to do?

MRS. HIGGINS. Do without, I’m afraid, Henry. The girl has a perfect

right to leave if she chooses.

HIGGINS [wandering distractedly across the room] But I can’t find

anything. I don’t know what appointments I’ve got. I’m— [Pickering

comes in. Mrs. Higgins puts down her pen and turns away from the

writing-table].

PICKERING [shaking hands] Good-morning, Mrs. Higgins. Has Henry told

you? [He sits down on the ottoman].

HIGGINS. What does that ass of an inspector say? Have you offered a

reward?

MRS. HIGGINS [rising in indignant amazement] You don’t mean to say you

have set the police after Eliza?

HIGGINS. Of course. What are the police for? What else could we do? [He

sits in the Elizabethan chair].

PICKERING. The inspector made a lot of difficulties. I really think he

suspected us of some improper purpose.

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, of course he did. What right have you to go to the

police and give the girl’s name as if she were a thief, or a lost

umbrella, or something? Really! [She sits down again, deeply vexed].

HIGGINS. But we want to find her.

PICKERING. We can’t let her go like this, you know, Mrs. Higgins. What

were we to do?

MRS. HIGGINS. You have no more sense, either of you, than two children.

Why—

The parlor-maid comes in and breaks off the conversation.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mr. Henry: a gentleman wants to see you very

particular. He’s been sent on from Wimpole Street.

HIGGINS. Oh, bother! I can’t see anyone now. Who is it?

THE PARLOR-MAID. A Mr. Doolittle, Sir.

PICKERING. Doolittle! Do you mean the dustman?

THE PARLOR-MAID. Dustman! Oh no, sir: a gentleman.

HIGGINS [springing up excitedly] By George, Pick, it’s some relative of

hers that she’s gone to. Somebody we know nothing about. [To the

parlor-maid] Send him up, quick.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, Sir. [She goes].

HIGGINS [eagerly, going to his mother] Genteel relatives! now we shall

hear something. [He sits down in the Chippendale chair].

MRS. HIGGINS. Do you know any of her people?

PICKERING. Only her father: the fellow we told you about.

THE PARLOR-MAID [announcing] Mr. Doolittle. [She withdraws].

Doolittle enters. He is brilliantly dressed in a new fashionable

frock-coat, with white waistcoat and grey trousers. A flower in his

buttonhole, a dazzling silk hat, and patent leather shoes complete the

effect. He is too concerned with the business he has come on to notice

Mrs. Higgins. He walks straight to Higgins, and accosts him with

vehement reproach.

DOOLITTLE [indicating his own person] See here! Do you see this? You

done this.

HIGGINS. Done what, man?

DOOLITTLE. This, I tell you. Look at it. Look at this hat. Look at this

coat.

PICKERING. Has Eliza been buying you clothes?

DOOLITTLE. Eliza! not she. Not half. Why would she buy me clothes?

MRS. HIGGINS. Good-morning, Mr. Doolittle. Won’t you sit down?

DOOLITTLE [taken aback as he becomes conscious that he has forgotten

his hostess] Asking your pardon, ma’am. [He approaches her and shakes

her proffered hand]. Thank you. [He sits down on the ottoman, on

Pickering’s right]. I am that full of what has happened to me that I

can’t think of anything else.

HIGGINS. What the dickens has happened to you?

DOOLITTLE. I shouldn’t mind if it had only happened to me: anything

might happen to anybody and nobody to blame but Providence, as you

might say. But this is something that you done to me: yes, you, Henry

Higgins.

HIGGINS. Have you found Eliza? That’s the point.

DOOLITTLE. Have you lost her?

HIGGINS. Yes.

DOOLITTLE. You have all the luck, you have. I ain’t found her; but

she’ll find me quick enough now after what you done to me.

MRS. HIGGINS. But what has my son done to you, Mr. Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE. Done to me! Ruined me. Destroyed my happiness. Tied me up

and delivered me into the hands of middle class morality.

HIGGINS [rising intolerantly and standing over Doolittle] You’re

raving. You’re drunk. You’re mad. I gave you five pounds. After that I

had two conversations with you, at half-a-crown an hour. I’ve never

seen you since.

DOOLITTLE. Oh! Drunk! am I? Mad! am I? Tell me this. Did you or did you

not write a letter to an old blighter in America that was giving five

millions to found Moral Reform Societies all over the world, and that

wanted you to invent a universal language for him?

HIGGINS. What! Ezra D. Wannafeller! He’s dead. [He sits down again

carelessly].

DOOLITTLE. Yes: he’s dead; and I’m done for. Now did you or did you not

write a letter to him to say that the most original moralist at present

in England, to the best of your knowledge, was Alfred Doolittle, a

common dustman.

HIGGINS. Oh, after your last visit I remember making some silly joke of

the kind.

DOOLITTLE. Ah! you may well call it a silly joke. It put the lid on me

right enough. Just give him the chance he wanted to show that Americans

is not like us: that they recognize and respect merit in every class of

life, however humble. Them words is in his blooming will, in which,

Henry Higgins, thanks to your silly joking, he leaves me a share in his

Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that

I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as

they ask me up to six times a year.

HIGGINS. The devil he does! Whew! [Brightening suddenly] What a lark!

PICKERING. A safe thing for you, Doolittle. They won’t ask you twice.

DOOLITTLE. It ain’t the lecturing I mind. I’ll lecture them blue in the

face, I will, and not turn a hair. It’s making a gentleman of me that I

object to. Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was

free. I touched pretty nigh everybody for money when I wanted it, same

as I touched you, Henry Higgins. Now I am worrited; tied neck and

heels; and everybody touches me for money. It’s a fine thing for you,

says my solicitor. Is it? says I. You mean it’s a good thing for you, I

says. When I was a poor man and had a solicitor once when they found a

pram in the dust cart, he got me off, and got shut of me and got me

shut of him as quick as he could. Same with the doctors: used to shove

me out of the hospital before I could hardly stand on my legs, and

nothing to pay. Now they finds out that I’m not a healthy man and can’t

live unless they looks after me twice a day. In the house I’m not let

do a hand’s turn for myself: somebody else must do it and touch me for

it. A year ago I hadn’t a relative in the world except two or three

that wouldn’t speak to me. Now I’ve fifty, and not a decent week’s

wages among the lot of them. I have to live for others and not for

myself: that’s middle class morality. You talk of losing Eliza. Don’t

you be anxious: I bet she’s on my doorstep by this: she that could

support herself easy by selling flowers if I wasn’t respectable. And

the next one to touch me will be you, Henry Higgins. I’ll have to learn

to speak middle class language from you, instead of speaking proper

English. That’s where you’ll come in; and I daresay that’s what you

done it for.

MRS. HIGGINS. But, my dear Mr. Doolittle, you need not suffer all this

if you are really in earnest. Nobody can force you to accept this

bequest. You can repudiate it. Isn’t that so, Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. I believe so.

DOOLITTLE [softening his manner in deference to her sex] That’s the

tragedy of it, ma’am. It’s easy to say chuck it; but I haven’t the

nerve. Which one of us has? We’re all intimidated. Intimidated, ma’am:

that’s what we are. What is there for me if I chuck it but the

workhouse in my old age? I have to dye my hair already to keep my job

as a dustman. If I was one of the deserving poor, and had put by a bit,

I could chuck it; but then why should I, acause the deserving poor

might as well be millionaires for all the happiness they ever has. They

don’t know what happiness is. But I, as one of the undeserving poor,

have nothing between me and the pauper’s uniform but this here blasted

three thousand a year that shoves me into the middle class. (Excuse the

expression, ma’am: you’d use it yourself if you had my provocation).

They’ve got you every way you turn: it’s a choice between the Skilly of

the workhouse and the Char Bydis of the middle class; and I haven’t the

nerve for the workhouse. Intimidated: that’s what I am. Broke. Bought

up. Happier men than me will call for my dust, and touch me for their

tip; and I’ll look on helpless, and envy them. And that’s what your son

has brought me to. [He is overcome by emotion].

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, I’m very glad you’re not going to do anything

foolish, Mr. Doolittle. For this solves the problem of Eliza’s future.

You can provide for her now.

DOOLITTLE [with melancholy resignation] Yes, ma’am; I’m expected to

provide for everyone now, out of three thousand a year.

HIGGINS [jumping up] Nonsense! he can’t provide for her. He shan’t

provide for her. She doesn’t belong to him. I paid him five pounds for

her. Doolittle: either you’re an honest man or a rogue.

DOOLITTLE [tolerantly] A little of both, Henry, like the rest of us: a

little of both.

HIGGINS. Well, you took that money for the girl; and you have no right

to take her as well.

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry: don’t be absurd. If you really want to know where

Eliza is, she is upstairs.

HIGGINS [amazed] Upstairs!!! Then I shall jolly soon fetch her

downstairs. [He makes resolutely for the door].

MRS. HIGGINS [rising and following him] Be quiet, Henry. Sit down.

HIGGINS. I—

MRS. HIGGINS. Sit down, dear; and listen to me.

HIGGINS. Oh very well, very well, very well. [He throws himself

ungraciously on the ottoman, with his face towards the windows]. But I

think you might have told me this half an hour ago.

MRS. HIGGINS. Eliza came to me this morning. She passed the night

partly walking about in a rage, partly trying to throw herself into the

river and being afraid to, and partly in the Carlton Hotel. She told me

of the brutal way you two treated her.

HIGGINS [bounding up again] What!

PICKERING [rising also] My dear Mrs. Higgins, she’s been telling you

stories. We didn’t treat her brutally. We hardly said a word to her;

and we parted on particularly good terms. [Turning on Higgins].

Higgins: did you bully her after I went to bed?

HIGGINS. Just the other way about. She threw my slippers in my face.

She behaved in the most outrageous way. I never gave her the slightest

provocation. The slippers came bang into my face the moment I entered

the room—before I had uttered a word. And used perfectly awful

language.

PICKERING [astonished] But why? What did we do to her?

MRS. HIGGINS. I think I know pretty well what you did. The girl is

naturally rather affectionate, I think. Isn’t she, Mr. Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE. Very tender-hearted, ma’am. Takes after me.

MRS. HIGGINS. Just so. She had become attached to you both. She worked

very hard for you, Henry! I don’t think you quite realize what anything

in the nature of brain work means to a girl like that. Well, it seems

that when the great day of trial came, and she did this wonderful thing

for you without making a single mistake, you two sat there and never

said a word to her, but talked together of how glad you were that it

was all over and how you had been bored with the whole thing. And then

you were surprised because she threw your slippers at you! _I_ should

have thrown the fire-irons at you.

HIGGINS. We said nothing except that we were tired and wanted to go to

bed. Did we, Pick?

PICKERING [shrugging his shoulders] That was all.

MRS. HIGGINS [ironically] Quite sure?

PICKERING. Absolutely. Really, that was all.

MRS. HIGGINS. You didn’t thank her, or pet her, or admire her, or tell

her how splendid she’d been.

HIGGINS [impatiently] But she knew all about that. We didn’t make

speeches to her, if that’s what you mean.

PICKERING [conscience stricken] Perhaps we were a little inconsiderate.

Is she very angry?

MRS. HIGGINS [returning to her place at the writing-table] Well, I’m

afraid she won’t go back to Wimpole Street, especially now that Mr.

Doolittle is able to keep up the position you have thrust on her; but

she says she is quite willing to meet you on friendly terms and to let

bygones be bygones.

HIGGINS [furious] Is she, by George? Ho!

MRS. HIGGINS. If you promise to behave yourself, Henry, I’ll ask her to

come down. If not, go home; for you have taken up quite enough of my

time.

HIGGINS. Oh, all right. Very well. Pick: you behave yourself. Let us

put on our best Sunday manners for this creature that we picked out of

the mud. [He flings himself sulkily into the Elizabethan chair].

DOOLITTLE [remonstrating] Now, now, Henry Higgins! have some

consideration for my feelings as a middle class man.

MRS. HIGGINS. Remember your promise, Henry. [She presses the

bell-button on the writing-table]. Mr. Doolittle: will you be so good

as to step out on the balcony for a moment. I don’t want Eliza to have

the shock of your news until she has made it up with these two

gentlemen. Would you mind?

DOOLITTLE. As you wish, lady. Anything to help Henry to keep her off my

hands. [He disappears through the window].

The parlor-maid answers the bell. Pickering sits down in Doolittle’s

place.

MRS. HIGGINS. Ask Miss Doolittle to come down, please.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, mam. [She goes out].

MRS. HIGGINS. Now, Henry: be good.

HIGGINS. I am behaving myself perfectly.

PICKERING. He is doing his best, Mrs. Higgins.

A pause. Higgins throws back his head; stretches out his legs; and

begins to whistle.

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry, dearest, you don’t look at all nice in that

attitude.

HIGGINS [pulling himself together] I was not trying to look nice,

mother.

MRS. HIGGINS. It doesn’t matter, dear. I only wanted to make you speak.

HIGGINS. Why?

MRS. HIGGINS. Because you can’t speak and whistle at the same time.

Higgins groans. Another very trying pause.

HIGGINS [springing up, out of patience] Where the devil is that girl?

Are we to wait here all day?

Eliza enters, sunny, self-possessed, and giving a staggeringly

convincing exhibition of ease of manner. She carries a little

work-basket, and is very much at home. Pickering is too much taken

aback to rise.

LIZA. How do you do, Professor Higgins? Are you quite well?

HIGGINS [choking] Am I— [He can say no more].

LIZA. But of course you are: you are never ill. So glad to see you

again, Colonel Pickering. [He rises hastily; and they shake hands].

Quite chilly this morning, isn’t it? [She sits down on his left. He

sits beside her].

HIGGINS. Don’t you dare try this game on me. I taught it to you; and it

doesn’t take me in. Get up and come home; and don’t be a fool.

Eliza takes a piece of needlework from her basket, and begins to stitch

at it, without taking the least notice of this outburst.

MRS. HIGGINS. Very nicely put, indeed, Henry. No woman could resist

such an invitation.

HIGGINS. You let her alone, mother. Let her speak for herself. You will

jolly soon see whether she has an idea that I haven’t put into her head

or a word that I haven’t put into her mouth. I tell you I have created

this thing out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden; and now

she pretends to play the fine lady with me.

MRS. HIGGINS [placidly] Yes, dear; but you’ll sit down, won’t you?

Higgins sits down again, savagely.

LIZA [to Pickering, taking no apparent notice of Higgins, and working

away deftly] Will you drop me altogether now that the experiment is

over, Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. Oh don’t. You mustn’t think of it as an experiment. It

shocks me, somehow.

LIZA. Oh, I’m only a squashed cabbage leaf.

PICKERING [impulsively] No.

LIZA [continuing quietly]—but I owe so much to you that I should be

very unhappy if you forgot me.

PICKERING. It’s very kind of you to say so, Miss Doolittle.

LIZA. It’s not because you paid for my dresses. I know you are generous

to everybody with money. But it was from you that I learnt really nice

manners; and that is what makes one a lady, isn’t it? You see it was so

very difficult for me with the example of Professor Higgins always

before me. I was brought up to be just like him, unable to control

myself, and using bad language on the slightest provocation. And I

should never have known that ladies and gentlemen didn’t behave like

that if you hadn’t been there.

HIGGINS. Well!!

PICKERING. Oh, that’s only his way, you know. He doesn’t mean it.

LIZA. Oh, I didn’t mean it either, when I was a flower girl. It was

only my way. But you see I did it; and that’s what makes the difference

after all.

PICKERING. No doubt. Still, he taught you to speak; and I couldn’t have

done that, you know.

LIZA [trivially] Of course: that is his profession.

HIGGINS. Damnation!

LIZA [continuing] It was just like learning to dance in the fashionable

way: there was nothing more than that in it. But do you know what began

my real education?

PICKERING. What?

LIZA [stopping her work for a moment] Your calling me Miss Doolittle

that day when I first came to Wimpole Street. That was the beginning of

self-respect for me. [She resumes her stitching]. And there were a

hundred little things you never noticed, because they came naturally to

you. Things about standing up and taking off your hat and opening

doors—

PICKERING. Oh, that was nothing.

LIZA. Yes: things that showed you thought and felt about me as if I

were something better than a scullery-maid; though of course I know you

would have been just the same to a scullery-maid if she had been let in

the drawing-room. You never took off your boots in the dining room when

I was there.

PICKERING. You mustn’t mind that. Higgins takes off his boots all over

the place.

LIZA. I know. I am not blaming him. It is his way, isn’t it? But it

made such a difference to me that you didn’t do it. You see, really and

truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the

proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a

flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall

always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats

me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to

you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

MRS. HIGGINS. Please don’t grind your teeth, Henry.

PICKERING. Well, this is really very nice of you, Miss Doolittle.

LIZA. I should like you to call me Eliza, now, if you would.

PICKERING. Thank you. Eliza, of course.

LIZA. And I should like Professor Higgins to call me Miss Doolittle.

HIGGINS. I’ll see you damned first.

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry! Henry!

PICKERING [laughing] Why don’t you slang back at him? Don’t stand it.

It would do him a lot of good.

LIZA. I can’t. I could have done it once; but now I can’t go back to

it. Last night, when I was wandering about, a girl spoke to me; and I

tried to get back into the old way with her; but it was no use. You

told me, you know, that when a child is brought to a foreign country,

it picks up the language in a few weeks, and forgets its own. Well, I

am a child in your country. I have forgotten my own language, and can

speak nothing but yours. That’s the real break-off with the corner of

Tottenham Court Road. Leaving Wimpole Street finishes it.

PICKERING [much alarmed] Oh! but you’re coming back to Wimpole Street,

aren’t you? You’ll forgive Higgins?

HIGGINS [rising] Forgive! Will she, by George! Let her go. Let her find

out how she can get on without us. She will relapse into the gutter in

three weeks without me at her elbow.

Doolittle appears at the centre window. With a look of dignified

reproach at Higgins, he comes slowly and silently to his daughter, who,

with her back to the window, is unconscious of his approach.

PICKERING. He’s incorrigible, Eliza. You won’t relapse, will you?

LIZA. No: Not now. Never again. I have learnt my lesson. I don’t

believe I could utter one of the old sounds if I tried. [Doolittle

touches her on her left shoulder. She drops her work, losing her

self-possession utterly at the spectacle of her father’s splendor]

A—a—a—a—a—ah—ow—ooh!

HIGGINS [with a crow of triumph] Aha! Just so. A—a—a—a—ahowooh!

A—a—a—a—ahowooh ! A—a—a—a—ahowooh! Victory! Victory! [He throws

himself on the divan, folding his arms, and spraddling arrogantly].

DOOLITTLE. Can you blame the girl? Don’t look at me like that, Eliza.

It ain’t my fault. I’ve come into money.

LIZA. You must have touched a millionaire this time, dad.

DOOLITTLE. I have. But I’m dressed something special today. I’m going

to St. George’s, Hanover Square. Your stepmother is going to marry me.

LIZA [angrily] You’re going to let yourself down to marry that low

common woman!

PICKERING [quietly] He ought to, Eliza. [To Doolittle] Why has she

changed her mind?

DOOLITTLE [sadly] Intimidated, Governor. Intimidated. Middle class

morality claims its victim. Won’t you put on your hat, Liza, and come

and see me turned off?

LIZA. If the Colonel says I must, I—I’ll [almost sobbing] I’ll demean

myself. And get insulted for my pains, like enough.

DOOLITTLE. Don’t be afraid: she never comes to words with anyone now,

poor woman! respectability has broke all the spirit out of her.

PICKERING [squeezing Eliza’s elbow gently] Be kind to them, Eliza. Make

the best of it.

LIZA [forcing a little smile for him through her vexation] Oh well,

just to show there’s no ill feeling. I’ll be back in a moment. [She

goes out].

DOOLITTLE [sitting down beside Pickering] I feel uncommon nervous about

the ceremony, Colonel. I wish you’d come and see me through it.

PICKERING. But you’ve been through it before, man. You were married to

Eliza’s mother.

DOOLITTLE. Who told you that, Colonel?

PICKERING. Well, nobody told me. But I concluded naturally—

DOOLITTLE. No: that ain’t the natural way, Colonel: it’s only the

middle class way. My way was always the undeserving way. But don’t say

nothing to Eliza. She don’t know: I always had a delicacy about telling

her.

PICKERING. Quite right. We’ll leave it so, if you don’t mind.

DOOLITTLE. And you’ll come to the church, Colonel, and put me through

straight?

PICKERING. With pleasure. As far as a bachelor can.

MRS. HIGGINS. May I come, Mr. Doolittle? I should be very sorry to miss

your wedding.

DOOLITTLE. I should indeed be honored by your condescension, ma’am; and

my poor old woman would take it as a tremenjous compliment. She’s been

very low, thinking of the happy days that are no more.

MRS. HIGGINS [rising] I’ll order the carriage and get ready. [The men

rise, except Higgins]. I shan’t be more than fifteen minutes. [As she

goes to the door Eliza comes in, hatted and buttoning her gloves]. I’m

going to the church to see your father married, Eliza. You had better

come in the brougham with me. Colonel Pickering can go on with the

bridegroom.

Mrs. Higgins goes out. Eliza comes to the middle of the room between

the centre window and the ottoman. Pickering joins her.

DOOLITTLE. Bridegroom! What a word! It makes a man realize his

position, somehow. [He takes up his hat and goes towards the door].

PICKERING. Before I go, Eliza, do forgive him and come back to us.

LIZA. I don’t think papa would allow me. Would you, dad?

DOOLITTLE [sad but magnanimous] They played you off very cunning,

Eliza, them two sportsmen. If it had been only one of them, you could

have nailed him. But you see, there was two; and one of them chaperoned

the other, as you might say. [To Pickering] It was artful of you,

Colonel; but I bear no malice: I should have done the same myself. I

been the victim of one woman after another all my life; and I don’t

grudge you two getting the better of Eliza. I shan’t interfere. It’s

time for us to go, Colonel. So long, Henry. See you in St. George’s,

Eliza. [He goes out].

PICKERING [coaxing] Do stay with us, Eliza. [He follows Doolittle].

Eliza goes out on the balcony to avoid being alone with Higgins. He

rises and joins her there. She immediately comes back into the room and

makes for the door; but he goes along the balcony quickly and gets his

back to the door before she reaches it.

HIGGINS. Well, Eliza, you’ve had a bit of your own back, as you call

it. Have you had enough? and are you going to be reasonable? Or do you

want any more?

LIZA. You want me back only to pick up your slippers and put up with

your tempers and fetch and carry for you.

HIGGINS. I haven’t said I wanted you back at all.

LIZA. Oh, indeed. Then what are we talking about?

HIGGINS. About you, not about me. If you come back I shall treat you

just as I have always treated you. I can’t change my nature; and I

don’t intend to change my manners. My manners are exactly the same as

Colonel Pickering’s.

LIZA. That’s not true. He treats a flower girl as if she was a duchess.

HIGGINS. And I treat a duchess as if she was a flower girl.

LIZA. I see. [She turns away composedly, and sits on the ottoman,

facing the window]. The same to everybody.

HIGGINS. Just so.

LIZA. Like father.

HIGGINS [grinning, a little taken down] Without accepting the

comparison at all points, Eliza, it’s quite true that your father is

not a snob, and that he will be quite at home in any station of life to

which his eccentric destiny may call him. [Seriously] The great secret,

Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other

particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human

souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no

third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

LIZA. Amen. You are a born preacher.

HIGGINS [irritated] The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but

whether you ever heard me treat anyone else better.

LIZA [with sudden sincerity] I don’t care how you treat me. I don’t

mind your swearing at me. I don’t mind a black eye: I’ve had one before

this. But [standing up and facing him] I won’t be passed over.

HIGGINS. Then get out of my way; for I won’t stop for you. You talk

about me as if I were a motor bus.

LIZA. So you are a motor bus: all bounce and go, and no consideration

for anyone. But I can do without you: don’t think I can’t.

HIGGINS. I know you can. I told you you could.

LIZA [wounded, getting away from him to the other side of the ottoman

with her face to the hearth] I know you did, you brute. You wanted to

get rid of me.

HIGGINS. Liar.

LIZA. Thank you. [She sits down with dignity].

HIGGINS. You never asked yourself, I suppose, whether I could do

without YOU.

LIZA [earnestly] Don’t you try to get round me. You’ll HAVE to do

without me.

HIGGINS [arrogant] I can do without anybody. I have my own soul: my own

spark of divine fire. But [with sudden humility] I shall miss you,

Eliza. [He sits down near her on the ottoman]. I have learnt something

from your idiotic notions: I confess that humbly and gratefully. And I

have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance. I like them, rather.

LIZA. Well, you have both of them on your gramophone and in your book

of photographs. When you feel lonely without me, you can turn the

machine on. It’s got no feelings to hurt.

HIGGINS. I can’t turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you

can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.

LIZA. Oh, you ARE a devil. You can twist the heart in a girl as easy as

some could twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs. Pearce warned me. Time and

again she has wanted to leave you; and you always got round her at the

last minute. And you don’t care a bit for her. And you don’t care a bit

for me.

HIGGINS. I care for life, for humanity; and you are a part of it that

has come my way and been built into my house. What more can you or

anyone ask?

LIZA. I won’t care for anybody that doesn’t care for me.

HIGGINS. Commercial principles, Eliza. Like [reproducing her Covent

Garden pronunciation with professional exactness] s’yollin voylets

[selling violets], isn’t it?

LIZA. Don’t sneer at me. It’s mean to sneer at me.

HIGGINS. I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn’t become

either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my righteous

contempt for Commercialism. I don’t and won’t trade in affection. You

call me a brute because you couldn’t buy a claim on me by fetching my

slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman

fetching a man’s slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch YOUR

slippers? I think a good deal more of you for throwing them in my face.

No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who

cares for a slave? If you come back, come back for the sake of good

fellowship; for you’ll get nothing else. You’ve had a thousand times as

much out of me as I have out of you; and if you dare to set up your

little dog’s tricks of fetching and carrying slippers against my

creation of a Duchess Eliza, I’ll slam the door in your silly face.

LIZA. What did you do it for if you didn’t care for me?

HIGGINS [heartily] Why, because it was my job.

LIZA. You never thought of the trouble it would make for me.

HIGGINS. Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been

afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. There’s

only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things. Cowards,

you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.

LIZA. I’m no preacher: I don’t notice things like that. I notice that

you don’t notice me.

HIGGINS [jumping up and walking about intolerantly] Eliza: you’re an

idiot. I waste the treasures of my Miltonic mind by spreading them

before you. Once for all, understand that I go my way and do my work

without caring twopence what happens to either of us. I am not

intimidated, like your father and your stepmother. So you can come back

or go to the devil: which you please.

LIZA. What am I to come back for?

HIGGINS [bouncing up on his knees on the ottoman and leaning over it to

her] For the fun of it. That’s why I took you on.

LIZA [with averted face] And you may throw me out tomorrow if I don’t

do everything you want me to?

HIGGINS. Yes; and you may walk out tomorrow if I don’t do everything

YOU want me to.

LIZA. And live with my stepmother?

HIGGINS. Yes, or sell flowers.

LIZA. Oh! if I only COULD go back to my flower basket! I should be

independent of both you and father and all the world! Why did you take

my independence from me? Why did I give it up? I’m a slave now, for all

my fine clothes.

HIGGINS. Not a bit. I’ll adopt you as my daughter and settle money on

you if you like. Or would you rather marry Pickering?

LIZA [looking fiercely round at him] I wouldn’t marry YOU if you asked

me; and you’re nearer my age than what he is.

HIGGINS [gently] Than he is: not “than what he is.”

LIZA [losing her temper and rising] I’ll talk as I like. You’re not my

teacher now.

HIGGINS [reflectively] I don’t suppose Pickering would, though. He’s as

confirmed an old bachelor as I am.

LIZA. That’s not what I want; and don’t you think it. I’ve always had

chaps enough wanting me that way. Freddy Hill writes to me twice and

three times a day, sheets and sheets.

HIGGINS [disagreeably surprised] Damn his impudence! [He recoils and

finds himself sitting on his heels].

LIZA. He has a right to if he likes, poor lad. And he does love me.

HIGGINS [getting off the ottoman] You have no right to encourage him.

LIZA. Every girl has a right to be loved.

HIGGINS. What! By fools like that?

LIZA. Freddy’s not a fool. And if he’s weak and poor and wants me, may

be he’d make me happier than my betters that bully me and don’t want me.

HIGGINS. Can he MAKE anything of you? That’s the point.

LIZA. Perhaps I could make something of him. But I never thought of us

making anything of one another; and you never think of anything else. I

only want to be natural.

HIGGINS. In short, you want me to be as infatuated about you as Freddy?

Is that it?

LIZA. No I don’t. That’s not the sort of feeling I want from you. And

don’t you be too sure of yourself or of me. I could have been a bad

girl if I’d liked. I’ve seen more of some things than you, for all your

learning. Girls like me can drag gentlemen down to make love to them

easy enough. And they wish each other dead the next minute.

HIGGINS. Of course they do. Then what in thunder are we quarrelling

about?

LIZA [much troubled] I want a little kindness. I know I’m a common

ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I’m not dirt under

your feet. What I done [correcting herself] what I did was not for the

dresses and the taxis: I did it because we were pleasant together and I

come—came—to care for you; not to want you to make love to me, and

not forgetting the difference between us, but more friendly like.

HIGGINS. Well, of course. That’s just how I feel. And how Pickering

feels. Eliza: you’re a fool.

LIZA. That’s not a proper answer to give me [she sinks on the chair at

the writing-table in tears].

HIGGINS. It’s all you’ll get until you stop being a common idiot. If

you’re going to be a lady, you’ll have to give up feeling neglected if

the men you know don’t spend half their time snivelling over you and

the other half giving you black eyes. If you can’t stand the coldness

of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work

til you are more a brute than a human being; and then cuddle and

squabble and drink til you fall asleep. Oh, it’s a fine life, the life

of the gutter. It’s real: it’s warm: it’s violent: you can feel it

through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any

training or any work. Not like Science and Literature and Classical

Music and Philosophy and Art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish,

don’t you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like.

Marry some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick

pair of lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you

with. If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what

you can appreciate.

LIZA [desperate] Oh, you are a cruel tyrant. I can’t talk to you: you

turn everything against me: I’m always in the wrong. But you know very

well all the time that you’re nothing but a bully. You know I can’t go

back to the gutter, as you call it, and that I have no real friends in

the world but you and the Colonel. You know well I couldn’t bear to

live with a low common man after you two; and it’s wicked and cruel of

you to insult me by pretending I could. You think I must go back to

Wimpole Street because I have nowhere else to go but father’s. But

don’t you be too sure that you have me under your feet to be trampled

on and talked down. I’ll marry Freddy, I will, as soon as he’s able to

support me.

HIGGINS [sitting down beside her] Rubbish! you shall marry an

ambassador. You shall marry the Governor-General of India or the

Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or somebody who wants a deputy-queen. I’m

not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy.

LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I haven’t forgot what you

said a minute ago; and I won’t be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a

puppy. If I can’t have kindness, I’ll have independence.

HIGGINS. Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all

dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

LIZA [rising determinedly] I’ll let you see whether I’m dependent on

you. If you can preach, I can teach. I’ll go and be a teacher.

HIGGINS. What’ll you teach, in heaven’s name?

LIZA. What you taught me. I’ll teach phonetics.

HIGGINS. Ha! Ha! Ha!

LIZA. I’ll offer myself as an assistant to Professor Nepean.

HIGGINS [rising in a fury] What! That impostor! that humbug! that

toadying ignoramus! Teach him my methods! my discoveries! You take one

step in his direction and I’ll wring your neck. [He lays hands on her].

Do you hear?

LIZA [defiantly non-resistant] Wring away. What do I care? I knew you’d

strike me some day. [He lets her go, stamping with rage at having

forgotten himself, and recoils so hastily that he stumbles back into

his seat on the ottoman]. Aha! Now I know how to deal with you. What a

fool I was not to think of it before! You can’t take away the knowledge

you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil

and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! That’s done you,

Henry Higgins, it has. Now I don’t care that [snapping her fingers] for

your bullying and your big talk. I’ll advertize it in the papers that

your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll

teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a

thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet

and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to

lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.

HIGGINS [wondering at her] You damned impudent slut, you! But it’s

better than snivelling; better than fetching slippers and finding

spectacles, isn’t it? [Rising] By George, Eliza, I said I’d make a

woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.

LIZA. Yes: you turn round and make up to me now that I’m not afraid of

you, and can do without you.

HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes ago you were

like a millstone round my neck. Now you’re a tower of strength: a

consort battleship. You and I and Pickering will be three old bachelors

together instead of only two men and a silly girl.

Mrs. Higgins returns, dressed for the wedding. Eliza instantly becomes

cool and elegant.

MRS. HIGGINS. The carriage is waiting, Eliza. Are you ready?

LIZA. Quite. Is the Professor coming?

MRS. HIGGINS. Certainly not. He can’t behave himself in church. He

makes remarks out loud all the time on the clergyman’s pronunciation.

LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Good bye. [She goes to

the door].

MRS. HIGGINS [coming to Higgins] Good-bye, dear.

HIGGINS. Good-bye, mother. [He is about to kiss her, when he recollects

something]. Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a Stilton cheese,

will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a

tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman’s. You can choose

the color. [His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shows that he is

incorrigible].

LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself. [She sweeps out].

MRS. HIGGINS. I’m afraid you’ve spoiled that girl, Henry. But never

mind, dear: I’ll buy you the tie and gloves.

HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, don’t bother. She’ll buy em all right enough.

Good-bye.

They kiss. Mrs. Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash

in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly

self-satisfied manner.

***********************

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would

hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their

lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in

which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories.

Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because of

the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common

enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of

resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example

by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she

began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions have

assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a

romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable,

not only because her little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless

assumption, must be spoiled, but because the true sequel is patent to

anyone with a sense of human nature in general, and of feminine

instinct in particular.

Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked her, was

not coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered decision. When a

bachelor interests, and dominates, and teaches, and becomes important

to a spinster, as Higgins with Eliza, she always, if she has character

enough to be capable of it, considers very seriously indeed whether she

will play for becoming that bachelor’s wife, especially if he is so

little interested in marriage that a determined and devoted woman might

capture him if she set herself resolutely to do it. Her decision will

depend a good deal on whether she is really free to choose; and that,

again, will depend on her age and income. If she is at the end of her

youth, and has no security for her livelihood, she will marry him

because she must marry anybody who will provide for her. But at Eliza’s

age a good-looking girl does not feel that pressure; she feels free to

pick and choose. She is therefore guided by her instinct in the matter.

Eliza’s instinct tells her not to marry Higgins. It does not tell her

to give him up. It is not in the slightest doubt as to his remaining

one of the strongest personal interests in her life. It would be very

sorely strained if there was another woman likely to supplant her with

him. But as she feels sure of him on that last point, she has no doubt

at all as to her course, and would not have any, even if the difference

of twenty years in age, which seems so great to youth, did not exist

between them.

As our own instincts are not appealed to by her conclusion, let us see

whether we cannot discover some reason in it. When Higgins excused his

indifference to young women on the ground that they had an irresistible

rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his inveterate

old-bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the extent that

remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative boy has a

sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity

of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art

of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a

standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides

effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of

beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. This

makes him a standing puzzle to the huge number of uncultivated people

who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or

disagreeable parents, and to whom, consequently, literature, painting,

sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of

sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them;

and that Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize his

mother instead of Eliza, would seem to them absurd and unnatural.

Nevertheless, when we look round and see that hardly anyone is too ugly

or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she wants one,

whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the average in quality

and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the disentanglement of sex

from the associations with which it is so commonly confused, a

disentanglement which persons of genius achieve by sheer intellectual

analysis, is sometimes produced or aided by parental fascination.

Now, though Eliza was incapable of thus explaining to herself Higgins’s

formidable powers of resistance to the charm that prostrated Freddy at

the first glance, she was instinctively aware that she could never

obtain a complete grip of him, or come between him and his mother (the

first necessity of the married woman). To put it shortly, she knew that

for some mysterious reason he had not the makings of a married man in

him, according to her conception of a husband as one to whom she would

be his nearest and fondest and warmest interest. Even had there been no

mother-rival, she would still have refused to accept an interest in

herself that was secondary to philosophic interests. Had Mrs. Higgins

died, there would still have been Milton and the Universal Alphabet.

Landor’s remark that to those who have the greatest power of loving,

love is a secondary affair, would not have recommended Landor to Eliza.

Put that along with her resentment of Higgins’s domineering

superiority, and her mistrust of his coaxing cleverness in getting

round her and evading her wrath when he had gone too far with his

impetuous bullying, and you will see that Eliza’s instinct had good

grounds for warning her not to marry her Pygmalion.

And now, whom did Eliza marry? For if Higgins was a predestinate old

bachelor, she was most certainly not a predestinate old maid. Well,

that can be told very shortly to those who have not guessed it from the

indications she has herself given them.

Almost immediately after Eliza is stung into proclaiming her considered

determination not to marry Higgins, she mentions the fact that young

Mr. Frederick Eynsford Hill is pouring out his love for her daily

through the post. Now Freddy is young, practically twenty years younger

than Higgins: he is a gentleman (or, as Eliza would qualify him, a

toff), and speaks like one; he is nicely dressed, is treated by the

Colonel as an equal, loves her unaffectedly, and is not her master, nor

ever likely to dominate her in spite of his advantage of social

standing. Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all

women love to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten. “When

you go to women,” says Nietzsche, “take your whip with you.” Sensible

despots have never confined that precaution to women: they have taken

their whips with them when they have dealt with men, and been slavishly

idealized by the men over whom they have flourished the whip much more

than by women. No doubt there are slavish women as well as slavish men;

and women, like men, admire those that are stronger than themselves.

But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s

thumb are two different things. The weak may not be admired and

hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they

never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too

good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long

emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional

strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if

they have a stronger partner to help them out. Accordingly, it is a

truth everywhere in evidence that strong people, masculine or feminine,

not only do not marry stronger people, but do not show any preference

for them in selecting their friends. When a lion meets another with a

louder roar “the first lion thinks the last a bore.” The man or woman

who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other quality in a

partner than strength.

The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry strong people who

do not frighten them too much; and this often leads them to make the

mistake we describe metaphorically as “biting off more than they can

chew.” They want too much for too little; and when the bargain is

unreasonable beyond all bearing, the union becomes impossible: it ends

in the weaker party being either discarded or borne as a cross, which

is worse. People who are not only weak, but silly or obtuse as well,

are often in these difficulties.

This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza fairly sure to do

when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look forward to

a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy

fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is

biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a

degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she

marries either of them, marry Freddy.

And that is just what Eliza did.

Complications ensued; but they were economic, not romantic. Freddy had

no money and no occupation. His mother’s jointure, a last relic of the

opulence of Largelady Park, had enabled her to struggle along in

Earlscourt with an air of gentility, but not to procure any serious

secondary education for her children, much less give the boy a

profession. A clerkship at thirty shillings a week was beneath Freddy’s

dignity, and extremely distasteful to him besides. His prospects

consisted of a hope that if he kept up appearances somebody would do

something for him. The something appeared vaguely to his imagination as

a private secretaryship or a sinecure of some sort. To his mother it

perhaps appeared as a marriage to some lady of means who could not

resist her boy’s niceness. Fancy her feelings when he married a flower

girl who had become declassee under extraordinary circumstances which

were now notorious!

It is true that Eliza’s situation did not seem wholly ineligible. Her

father, though formerly a dustman, and now fantastically disclassed,

had become extremely popular in the smartest society by a social talent

which triumphed over every prejudice and every disadvantage. Rejected

by the middle class, which he loathed, he had shot up at once into the

highest circles by his wit, his dustmanship (which he carried like a

banner), and his Nietzschean transcendence of good and evil. At

intimate ducal dinners he sat on the right hand of the Duchess; and in

country houses he smoked in the pantry and was made much of by the

butler when he was not feeding in the dining-room and being consulted

by cabinet ministers. But he found it almost as hard to do all this on

four thousand a year as Mrs. Eynsford Hill to live in Earlscourt on an

income so pitiably smaller that I have not the heart to disclose its

exact figure. He absolutely refused to add the last straw to his burden

by contributing to Eliza’s support.

Thus Freddy and Eliza, now Mr. and Mrs. Eynsford Hill, would have spent

a penniless honeymoon but for a wedding present of 500 pounds from the

Colonel to Eliza. It lasted a long time because Freddy did not know how

to spend money, never having had any to spend, and Eliza, socially

trained by a pair of old bachelors, wore her clothes as long as they

held together and looked pretty, without the least regard to their

being many months out of fashion. Still, 500 pounds will not last two

young people for ever; and they both knew, and Eliza felt as well, that

they must shift for themselves in the end. She could quarter herself on

Wimpole Street because it had come to be her home; but she was quite

aware that she ought not to quarter Freddy there, and that it would not

be good for his character if she did.

Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected. When she consulted

them, Higgins declined to be bothered about her housing problem when

that solution was so simple. Eliza’s desire to have Freddy in the house

with her seemed of no more importance than if she had wanted an extra

piece of bedroom furniture. Pleas as to Freddy’s character, and the

moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were lost on Higgins.

He denied that Freddy had any character, and declared that if he tried

to do any useful work some competent person would have the trouble of

undoing it: a procedure involving a net loss to the community, and

great unhappiness to Freddy himself, who was obviously intended by

Nature for such light work as amusing Eliza, which, Higgins declared,

was a much more useful and honorable occupation than working in the

city. When Eliza referred again to her project of teaching phonetics,

Higgins abated not a jot of his violent opposition to it. He said she

was not within ten years of being qualified to meddle with his pet

subject; and as it was evident that the Colonel agreed with him, she

felt she could not go against them in this grave matter, and that she

had no right, without Higgins’s consent, to exploit the knowledge he

had given her; for his knowledge seemed to her as much his private

property as his watch: Eliza was no communist. Besides, she was

superstitiously devoted to them both, more entirely and frankly after

her marriage than before it.

It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which had cost him

much perplexed cogitation. He one day asked Eliza, rather shyly,

whether she had quite given up her notion of keeping a flower shop. She

replied that she had thought of it, but had put it out of her head,

because the Colonel had said, that day at Mrs. Higgins’s, that it would

never do. The Colonel confessed that when he said that, he had not

quite recovered from the dazzling impression of the day before. They

broke the matter to Higgins that evening. The sole comment vouchsafed

by him very nearly led to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the

effect that she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy.

Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said he had been

thinking of a shop himself; though it had presented itself to his

pennilessness as a small place in which Eliza should sell tobacco at

one counter whilst he sold newspapers at the opposite one. But he

agreed that it would be extraordinarily jolly to go early every morning

with Eliza to Covent Garden and buy flowers on the scene of their first

meeting: a sentiment which earned him many kisses from his wife. He

added that he had always been afraid to propose anything of the sort,

because Clara would make an awful row about a step that must damage her

matrimonial chances, and his mother could not be expected to like it

after clinging for so many years to that step of the social ladder on

which retail trade is impossible.

This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected by Freddy’s

mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions into those artistic

circles which were the highest within her reach, discovered that her

conversational qualifications were expected to include a grounding in

the novels of Mr. H.G. Wells. She borrowed them in various directions

so energetically that she swallowed them all within two months. The

result was a conversion of a kind quite common today. A modern Acts of

the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles if anyone were capable of

writing it.

Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as a disagreeable

and ridiculous person, and to her own mother as in some inexplicable

way a social failure, had never seen herself in either light; for,

though to some extent ridiculed and mimicked in West Kensington like

everybody else there, she was accepted as a rational and normal—or

shall we say inevitable?—sort of human being. At worst they called her

The Pusher; but to them no more than to herself had it ever occurred

that she was pushing the air, and pushing it in a wrong direction.

Still, she was not happy. She was growing desperate. Her one asset, the

fact that her mother was what the Epsom greengrocer called a carriage

lady had no exchange value, apparently. It had prevented her from

getting educated, because the only education she could have afforded

was education with the Earlscourt green grocer’s daughter. It had led

her to seek the society of her mother’s class; and that class simply

would not have her, because she was much poorer than the greengrocer,

and, far from being able to afford a maid, could not afford even a

housemaid, and had to scrape along at home with an illiberally treated

general servant. Under such circumstances nothing could give her an air

of being a genuine product of Largelady Park. And yet its tradition

made her regard a marriage with anyone within her reach as an

unbearable humiliation. Commercial people and professional people in a

small way were odious to her. She ran after painters and novelists; but

she did not charm them; and her bold attempts to pick up and practise

artistic and literary talk irritated them. She was, in short, an utter

failure, an ignorant, incompetent, pretentious, unwelcome, penniless,

useless little snob; and though she did not admit these

disqualifications (for nobody ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind

until the possibility of a way out dawns on them) she felt their

effects too keenly to be satisfied with her position.

Clara had a startling eyeopener when, on being suddenly wakened to

enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who dazzled her and produced in her

a gushing desire to take her for a model, and gain her friendship, she

discovered that this exquisite apparition had graduated from the gutter

in a few months’ time. It shook her so violently, that when Mr. H. G.

Wells lifted her on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at

the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society

to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs

and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a conviction

of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of General Booth or

Gypsy Smith. Clara’s snobbery went bang. Life suddenly began to move

with her. Without knowing how or why, she began to make friends and

enemies. Some of the acquaintances to whom she had been a tedious or

indifferent or ridiculous affliction, dropped her: others became

cordial. To her amazement she found that some “quite nice” people were

saturated with Wells, and that this accessibility to ideas was the

secret of their niceness. People she had thought deeply religious, and

had tried to conciliate on that tack with disastrous results, suddenly

took an interest in her, and revealed a hostility to conventional

religion which she had never conceived possible except among the most

desperate characters. They made her read Galsworthy; and Galsworthy

exposed the vanity of Largelady Park and finished her. It exasperated

her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many

unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she

had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping

well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have

come into any sort of sincere human contact. In the radiance of these

discoveries, and the tumult of their reaction, she made a fool of

herself as freely and conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted

Eliza’s expletive in Mrs. Higgins’s drawing-room; for the new-born

Wellsian had to find her bearings almost as ridiculously as a baby; but

nobody hates a baby for its ineptitudes, or thinks the worse of it for

trying to eat the matches; and Clara lost no friends by her follies.

They laughed at her to her face this time; and she had to defend

herself and fight it out as best she could.

When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he never did when he

could possibly help it) to make the desolating announcement that he and

his Eliza were thinking of blackening the Largelady scutcheon by

opening a shop, he found the little household already convulsed by a

prior announcement from Clara that she also was going to work in an old

furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been started by a fellow

Wellsian. This appointment Clara owed, after all, to her old social

accomplishment of Push. She had made up her mind that, cost what it

might, she would see Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had achieved her

end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise

deserved. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered

him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His

pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his

teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine

apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair

to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible. Clara talked of nothing else

for weeks and weeks afterwards. And as she happened to talk to the lady

of the furniture shop, and that lady also desired above all things to

know Mr. Wells and sell pretty things to him, she offered Clara a job

on the chance of achieving that end through her.

And so it came about that Eliza’s luck held, and the expected

opposition to the flower shop melted away. The shop is in the arcade of

a railway station not very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and

if you live in that neighborhood you may go there any day and buy a

buttonhole from Eliza.

Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would you not like to be

assured that the shop was an immense success, thanks to Eliza’s charms

and her early business experience in Covent Garden? Alas! the truth is

the truth: the shop did not pay for a long time, simply because Eliza

and her Freddy did not know how to keep it. True, Eliza had not to

begin at the very beginning: she knew the names and prices of the

cheaper flowers; and her elation was unbounded when she found that

Freddy, like all youths educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly

inefficient schools, knew a little Latin. It was very little, but

enough to make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at

his ease with botanical nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew nothing

else; and Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen shillings

or so, and had acquired a certain familiarity with the language of

Milton from her struggles to qualify herself for winning Higgins’s bet,

could not write out a bill without utterly disgracing the

establishment. Freddy’s power of stating in Latin that Balbus built a

wall and that Gaul was divided into three parts did not carry with it

the slightest knowledge of accounts or business: Colonel Pickering had

to explain to him what a cheque book and a bank account meant. And the

pair were by no means easily teachable. Freddy backed up Eliza in her

obstinate refusal to believe that they could save money by engaging a

bookkeeper with some knowledge of the business. How, they argued, could

you possibly save money by going to extra expense when you already

could not make both ends meet? But the Colonel, after making the ends

meet over and over again, at last gently insisted; and Eliza, humbled

to the dust by having to beg from him so often, and stung by the

uproarious derision of Higgins, to whom the notion of Freddy succeeding

at anything was a joke that never palled, grasped the fact that

business, like phonetics, has to be learned.

On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in

shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and

typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the

elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the

London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the

director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the

flower business. He, being a humorist, explained to them the method of

the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman

who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined

the information. He suggested that they should combine the London

School with Kew Gardens. Eliza, to whom the procedure of the Dickensian

gentleman seemed perfectly correct (as in fact it was) and not in the

least funny (which was only her ignorance) took his advice with entire

gravity. But the effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was a

request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton’s verse,

was calligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful Italian hand,

that he would teach her to write. He declared that she was congenitally

incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least of Milton’s

words; but she persisted; and again he suddenly threw himself into the

task of teaching her with a combination of stormy intensity,

concentrated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting

disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and

destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely

uncommercial script which was a positive extension of her personal

beauty, and spending three times as much on stationery as anyone else

because certain qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to

her. She could not even address an envelope in the usual way because it

made the margins all wrong.

Their commercial school days were a period of disgrace and despair for

the young couple. They seemed to be learning nothing about flower

shops. At last they gave it up as hopeless, and shook the dust of the

shorthand schools, and the polytechnics, and the London School of

Economics from their feet for ever. Besides, the business was in some

mysterious way beginning to take care of itself. They had somehow

forgotten their objections to employing other people. They came to the

conclusion that their own way was the best, and that they had really a

remarkable talent for business. The Colonel, who had been compelled for

some years to keep a sufficient sum on current account at his bankers

to make up their deficits, found that the provision was unnecessary:

the young people were prospering. It is true that there was not quite

fair play between them and their competitors in trade. Their week-ends

in the country cost them nothing, and saved them the price of their

Sunday dinners; for the motor car was the Colonel’s; and he and Higgins

paid the hotel bills. Mr. F. Hill, florist and greengrocer (they soon

discovered that there was money in asparagus; and asparagus led to

other vegetables), had an air which stamped the business as classy; and

in private life he was still Frederick Eynsford Hill, Esquire. Not that

there was any swank about him: nobody but Eliza knew that he had been

christened Frederick Challoner. Eliza herself swanked like anything.

That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is astonishing how much

Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimpole Street in

spite of the shop and her own family. And it is notable that though she

never nags her husband, and frankly loves the Colonel as if she were

his favorite daughter, she has never got out of the habit of nagging

Higgins that was established on the fatal night when she won his bet

for him. She snaps his head off on the faintest provocation, or on

none. He no longer dares to tease her by assuming an abysmal

inferiority of Freddy’s mind to his own. He storms and bullies and

derides; but she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to

ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins; and it is the only

request of his that brings a mulish expression into her face. Nothing

but some emergency or calamity great enough to break down all likes and

dislikes, and throw them both back on their common humanity—and may

they be spared any such trial!—will ever alter this. She knows that

Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not need her. The

very scrupulousness with which he told her that day that he had become

used to having her there, and dependent on her for all sorts of little

services, and that he should miss her if she went away (it would never

have occurred to Freddy or the Colonel to say anything of the sort)

deepens her inner certainty that she is “no more to him than them

slippers”, yet she has a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper

than the infatuation of commoner souls. She is immensely interested in

him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she

could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with

nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his

pedestal and see him making love like any common man. We all have

private imaginations of that sort. But when it comes to business, to

the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams

and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does

not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never does quite like

Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether

agreeable.