Eliza is a very attractive and interesting character, and that much is obvious to current tastes. I am not going to add to the body of things to be said about her, beyond emphasising that she is not only a resourceful and heroic figure, but is also very bright.

I once had a colleague who had a desire to play Eliza that was the equal of my desire to play Higgins. I never discovered whether or not she could act, but she was beautiful and clever — and a linguist (though not a phonetician) — and resourceful and (at least originally) working-class. In fact she had once been my student, but that had been much earlier. ``That thing? Sacred, I assure you''. I don't know how good an Eliza she would have made, for although she was sociable and outgoing she was not a natural, warmhearted, spontaneous creature like Eliza. Eliza is very lovable. But then, in their different ways, all the major characters of Pygmalion are lovable. There are no easy villains and no easy heroes ... except possibly Eliza, i s'pose... Every character in the play is rounded and entirely believable. That is one of the great — and usually unremarked — strengths of this play.

I have always wanted to play Higgins. I carry a particular torch for him, because he is too often thought of as a monster. Higgins is not a monster, and the play would be a lesser work if he were. I have lots of reasons of course but one of them is that not enough people read him properly, and i want him to be properly understood. Quite apart from anything else if you misunderstand any of the characters you misunderstand the play. It is easy to represent him as a cardboard villain, a bullying monster who is vile to poor Eliza. I want to set the record straight. Higgins is a teacher (probably at UCL, tho' we aren't told. My father, too, was once a language professor at UCL) and this is key to understanding their relationship, and key also to understanding him .

OK, how does Higgins being an academic show up? Consider Higgins' line in response to Eliza's question ``Why did you do it?'' The stage directions require the actor to deliver the reply (``Because it was my job'') heartily. The adverb probably sounds different to modern ears from how it sounded in 1912; what Shaw means by `heartily' is that this reply of Higgins' comes from the heart: he absolutely means it. Perhaps `passionately' would be a better modern equivalent. Higgins is the total professional; teaching Eliza is his job. He understands very clearly that The Reason Why He Was Put On Earth was precisely to do the things that Eliza is now asking of him. And hang the consequences, one might add.

Higgins is not a snob. (Nor is Pickering for that matter). Higgins tells off Eliza for thinking about setting off in a taxi to swank to her former associates. It is very striking how Higgins and Pickering treat Dolittle as an equal. (Dolittle is a totally wonderful creation — a work of genius. There could have been a play without him but it's infinitely better with him. One of the members of our troupe in Cambridge was the head porter at Sidney Sussex, who wanted to play Dolittle. It would have been wonderful, but we never got round to it). There is a certain amount of male bonding going on in this scene, and a modern director may be able to do something with that.
Higgins in some sense treats Eliza as an equal, rather in the way he treats Dolittle. He pops a chocolate into her mouth at one point. This could be thought of as a bit of flirting (temperamentally Higgins could be a flirt, tho' he usually has better things to do) but it's not so much flirtatiousness as familiarity. And later of course there is the exchange where Eliza says that Pickering treats a flower girl the way he treats a duchess whereas Higgins treats a duchess as a flower girl, and Higgins says — yes, the same for everybody. And of course he's not defending his boorishness, he's just saying — that he treats everyone the same.

Higgins is also very moral. He is utterly appalled by the thought that Dolittle might sell his daughter into prostitution for £50, but when he is given the true explanation for Dolittle's importunities he finds them hilarious. (Higgins actually finds quite a lot of things hilarious). He has immense respect for Eliza (tho' you have to see Higgins as an academic before you can spot this) so he certainly doesn't think Freddie is good enough for her; in consequence he is cross with Eliza for (as he sees it) leading Freddie on, beco's although he considers Freddie to be a complete idiot he doesn't think he should be ill-used on that account.

He is not only quite moral, but quite specifically entirely professional. He is genuinely black-affronted by any suggestion that his relationship with Eliza could be anything other than chaste. (``That thing? Sacred, i assure you''). I find myself puzzled from time to time that anyone could see the play ending with Higgins and Eliza getting married. It doesn't make any sense, and if you think it does then it shows that you haven't understood either the two characters — nor the plot —at all. Shaw knows his characters well enuff to know it's impossible, and in the Afterword (see below) he roundly tells off readers who make that mistake.

Hardly anyone seems to grasp the — to me — important (and obvious) point that Higgins thinks of himself as a comedian. I'm not sure how central this is to the plot but it certainly helps with a lot of the business. That is not to say that he is a comic character — he isn't; he is a comedian in the sense that he uses banter and joking to improvise his way out of situations, and this strategy both is conscious and comes naturally. Of course it can sometimes get him into trouble, as when he says that Freddy would be useful to the flower-shop operation co's he'd be the perfect errand-boy. He's probably also a good mimic (he's a phonetician after all); when recounting to his mother in the Tea-Party scene how Mrs Pierce tells him off about Eliza he quotes her ``you don't think, sir'', and he probably does it in her voice. His self-image as a comedian is shown up very clearly in the way he interacts with Dolittle. ``You're sure you won't take £10...?'' is a line that Higgins is playing for laughs. (And i do mean Higgins not Shaw ... by which i mean that it's intended to make Dolittle and Pickering laugh; the audience can laugh if they wish.) I can see him doing it with an exaggerated bit of pantomime with a chequebook, flourishing the quill pen withal ... tho' it seems from the stage directions that Higgins actually has two fivers to hand). It's also on show in the way in which he deflects Mrs Pierce's admonishments about swearing in front of Eliza, and by her half of that conversation, which makes it clear that she's seen it all before. He kids everyone along. Eliza spots it (as i keep saying, Eliza is sharp) and tells him off. And he accepts his telling-off. This is the sense in which he isn't a real bully. He accepts it beco's he respects her. He respects her for — among other things — having had the nerve to approach him in the first place. That telling-off tells us a lot about the two characters and their relationship. Eliza can see his mind-games, and she is confident enough in her own judgement to give him a piece of her mind. But reflect: she is also confident that Higgins will take it on the chin, and that no harm will come to her from it. It's another illustration of the way that Shaw manages to get an enormous amount of work out of even quite small details. This is wonderful stage-writing.
(I was visiting my lovely colleague Carsten Butz in Copenhagen once, and we had lunch with a friend of his from Heriot-Watt who was also visiting, a woman who had been an administrator in the maths department there. When i confessed to her that i had always dreamed of doing standup, she said ``Thomas, all academics dream of doing standup.'')

But i digress. Higgins as a comedian. He is always alert to the comic possibilities in every situation. The sequence where Mrs Pearce wonders what to do with Eliza's old clothes and Higgins says `Burn them!' is a scene that Higgins is playing for laughs, or — more specifically — to get a reaction. Of course he doesn't think that Eliza's clothes should be burned but he's not above floating the idea simply to set everybody a-twitter. And again, I can imagine playing Higgins in the scene with Mrs Pearce and the butter, brown boots etc with Higgins rolling his eyes.... certainly at Pickering, possibly even at the audience (tho' i can imagine the director might have something to say about that). It would have to be done with great care. Higgins is allowed to ham it up; the actor playing Higgins absolutely must not. Somehow these two have to be kept distinct. I sometimes wish i'd discussed this with Hugh Mellor (we shared a Pembroke connection and he belonged to the same amateur dramatic band as me) and i'm sure he would have had something useful to say, wearing either his philosopher's hat or his actor's hat. Come to think of it he would've done an excellent Pickering but it's too late for that now.

Higgins doesn't exactly bully people .... he steamrollers them.... the best word may be the (metaphorical use of the) french bousculer.

He's hard on Eliza, yes. He's hard on everyone of course but he's hard on her specifically, because she is good. (At the outset he says to her ``if I decide to teach you, I'll be worse than two fathers to you'') And she is good. Indeed at the start of the Tea Party he and Pickering positively rave to Mrs. Higgins about how good she is; they fall over each other to sing her praises. (Incidentally when Higgins says ``once Pickering starts shouting nobody can get a word in edgeways'' this is obviously a joke made by Higgins (not Shaw) — the idea that the gentle and mild-mannered Pickering would shout anybody down is obviously absurd). Any academic can tell you that they are hard on their good students — beco's you don't want to let them get away with rubbish. Weak students can be allowed to write rubbish; strong students must not! If i were playing Higgins i would want to play the Tea Party scene with Higgins (silently!) hanging on her every word like a doting parent, willing her on. He's proud of her. She's his star student and this is her Big Day.... it's the day of her viva vice examination, he believes in her, and he really really really wants her to do well. Incidentally having Higgins hanging on her every word is an improvement on the alternative, which is to have him being bored shitless by the whole business. Both serve to make the point of the following paragraph (Higgins' lack of interest in Society) but hanging on her every word does that and more. It would be good theatre too.

Higgins is an intellectual who is not impressed by the niceties and shibboleths of the bourgeois society in which he is embedded. In this he is quite typical of academics (Marx writes somewhere about how academics aren't proper members of the bourgeoisie) (``My celebrated son has no manners'' says Mrs Higgins). Of course the exigencies of the plot require him to be like this (how else do you arrange for the professor of phonetics to take on Eliza as a private pupil?) but Shaw makes a virtue out of a neccessity and runs with it. He tells the Rockefeller character that the most original moralist in Britain is a dustman called Alfred Dolittle. Rockefeller asks him a dam' fool question and gets a dam' fool answer; it's true that he fully deserves it, but it takes an anarchist like Higgins to dish it out. Perfect way to throw a spanner in the works. Higgins absolutely loves the idea of sabotaging Society's pretensions by passing off Eliza as a duchess. He is not impressed by duchesses at all (``We want none of your Lisson Grove prudery here, young woman; youve got to learn to behave like a duchess'', tho' one does have the feeling that this is not just Higgins speaking, but also Shaw through him). It has to be admitted that his approach to this project could fairly be described as irresponsible. His mother chides him for not thinking about the consequences. He is aware that there may be consequences, but he doesn't think they matter, or if they do, they're someone else's problem not his. Why should they matter, anyway? Society is a load of nonsense. Hence his contempt for the Eynsford-Hills .... a contempt which — in fairness — is nevertheless entirely untinged by malice. (In fact Higgins is generally entirely without malice). That said, it has to be admitted that he eggs on Clara

CLARA: Such nonsense, all this early victorian prudery;
HIGGINS: (tempting her) Such damned nonsense;
CLARA: Such bloody nonsense

a bit more than is kind but Clara has annoyed him and in any case he thinks Clara too ridiculous to be able to feel pain. Not his finest moment one has to admit, but at least Clara emerges in one piece at the end. (Come to think of it, all the characters emerge in one piece at the end.)

Shaw cared (and i think this is part of why i love him so much) about language, and of all his plays this is the one that best enables him to indulge his interest in language. Pygmalion is of course full of treasures, but one particularly worth making a fuss about is the tea-party scene. There are all sorts of social points being made of course, but here Shaw is delighting specifically in Eliza's language. Higgins is a phonetician, and is interested only in the sounds that Eliza makes; he has done nothing to work on her vocabulary and syntax. (She would have been up for it had he made her — as i keep saying, Eliza is bright) Shaw has an ear for Eliza's language in a way that Higgins does not; savour

ELIZA: ``Do I not! Them she lived with would have killed her for a hatpin, let alone a hat''

and savour not just the racy and vivid way in which Eliza naturally speaks but also all those initial `h's that Shaw has given her to hiss forth. Of course Shaw has given her a mouthful of `h's, what with dropping your `h's being such a huge class marker. This sensitivity to language is what makes the tea-party scene pure poetry. Shaw wrote novels but never, as far as i know, poetry. Unless it's the Tea-Party.

It is very important that Higgins' response (`` those...'') should be immediate: it's an automatic response. But as soon as the word those is out he realises that he is putting his foot in it, that his response is both irrelevant and cruel. Higgins is impulsive and irresponsible, yes, but he is not cruel and he is not obtuse. This is a situation he cannot banter his way out of, so he has to beat a quick retreat. That's why there must be a pause, followed by `slippers' in sotto voce. This analysis is borne out by the fact that to Eliza's riposte ``I didn't think it made any difference now'' he exhibits a chastened silence. It doesn't occur to him that this is the moment to tell her she's a star . . . this is ineptness rather than cruelty. His skill at banter is not matched by any appreciation of the beneficial uses to which his dexterity might be put. Eliza, too, is silent; she has picked up Higgins' double-take and is hanging him out to dry. The stage directions say: A pause. Eliza hopeless and crushed. Higgins a little uneasy. (As well he might be.)

Some writers have said that the slippers that Eliza throws at Higgins' head are a reference to Cinderella's. I think that is a bit far-fetched. It's more likely to be a case of what David Lodge calls ``the text working for you'' or what mathematicians call ``the law of small numbers'' (this is a joke about the law of large numbers and it means that in a confined space you get lots of coincidences, and they don't mean anything)

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What Happened Afterwards

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-mades 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 shew 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 declassé 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 500 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. 500 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 normal and — 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 greengrocer'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 caligraphy, 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 scrupulousnesse 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.!?