Classic Audiobook Collection - Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw ~ Full Audiobook [drama]

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw audiobook. Genre: drama Pygmalion (1913) is a play by George Bernard Shaw based on the Greek myth of the same name. It tells the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics (based on phonetician Henry Sweet), who makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can successfully pass off a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a refined society lady by teaching her how to speak with an upper class accent and training her in etiquette. In the process, Higgins and Doolittle grow close, but she ultimately rejects his domineering ways and declares she will marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill – a young, poor, gentleman. - The play was later the basis for the successful movie adaptation 'My Fair Lady' with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza and Rex Harrison as Prof. Higgins. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 1 (00:10:18) Chapter 2 (00:25:23) Chapter 3 (01:09:20) Chapter 4 (01:32:34) Chapter 5 (01:46:36) Chapter 6 (02:24:48) Chapter 7 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Act 1 of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Act 1 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 turn to the rest who seems wholly preoccupied with a note-book in which he is writing busily the church clock strikes the first quarter i'm getting chill to the bone what can freddie be doing all this time he's been gone twenty minutes not so long but he ought to have got us a cab by this you won't get no cab not until half-past eleven missis when they come back after dropping their theatre fares but we must have a cab we can't stand here until half-past eleven it's too bad well it ain't my fault mrs if freddie had a bit of gumption he would have got one at the theatre door what could he have done poor boy other people got cabs why couldn't he freddie 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 well haven't you got a cab there's not one to be had for love or money oh freddie there must be one you can't have tried too tiresome do you expect us to go and get one ourselves

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 or nearly to ludgate circus the other and they were all engaged did you try trafalgar square there wasn't one at trafalgar square Did you try? I tried as far as Charing Cross Station. Did you expect me to walk to Hammersmith? You haven't tried at all. You really are very helpless, Freddy. Go again, and don't come back until you have found a cab. I shall simply get soaked for nothing.

And what about us? Are we to stay here all night in this draught with next-to-nothing-nothing-on? You selfish pig! 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.

Now then, Freddy, look where you going, dear? Sorry. There's men as fire. Two bunches of violets trod in the mud. 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 18, perhaps 20, hardly older.

She wears a little sailor hat of black straw that has been long 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 how do you know that my son's name is freddie pray oh he's your son is he well if you done your duty by em as a mother should ee no bettern't spoil poor girl's fras and run away without pying will you pie me for em do nothing of the sort mother the idea please allow me clara have you any pennies no i'm

nothing smaller than sixpence i'll give you change for a tannicine lady give it to me now this is for your flowers thank you kindly lady make her give you the change these things are only a penny a bunch do hold your tongue clara you can keep the change oh thank you lady now tell me how you know that young gentleman's name i didn't i heard you call him by it don't try to deceive me who's trying to deceive you i call him freddie a charlie same as you might yourself if you was talking to a stranger we should be pleasant sixpence thrown away really mamma you might have spared freddie that an elderly gentleman of the amiable military type rushes into shelter and closes a dripping umbrella he is in the same plight as freddie 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 few oh sir is there any sign of it's stopping i'm afraid not it started worse than ever about two minutes ago oh dear this worse is a sign it's nearly over so cheer up catten and buy a flower for poor girl i'm sorry i haven't any change i'll give you change caton for a sovereign i've nothing less oh do buy a flower off me catten i can change half a crown take this for tuppence Now, don't be troublesome, there's a good girl. I really haven't any change. Stop, here's three hatens, if that's any use to you.

Thank you, sir. You be careful. Give him a flower for it. There's a bloke here behind, taking down every blessed word you're saying. I've done nothing wrong by speaking to the gentleman. I've right itself for hours if I keep off the curb. I'm a respectable girl, so help me. I never spoke to him except at a house and buy a flower off me.

Oh, sir, don't let him charge me. No, it means to me. The tiger won me carriages and drive me out on the street for speaking new gentlemen. They... There, there, there. Who's hurting you, you're silly girl. What do you take me for? It's all right.

He's a gentleman. Look at his boots. She thought you was a cop as anark, sir. What's a copas narque? It's a... Well, it's a coppers gnaq, as you might say. What else would you call it? A sort of informer.

I take my bubble oath. I never said a word. Oh, shut up, shut up, do I look like a policeman? Then what'd you take down my words for? How I know whether you took me down right? You just show me what you wrote about me. What's that? That ain't proper right.

I can't read that. I can. Cheer up, Captain. No, ho your flower for poor girl. Because I call him, Captain. I'm at now on. Oh, sir, don't let him lay a charge again. give me for a word like that you charge i make no charge really sir if you're 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

of course they could what business is it of yours you mind your own affairs he wants promotion he does taking down people's words they'll never said a word to him what arm if she did nice thing a girl can't shelter from the rain without being insulted he ain't a tech he's a blooming busy body that's what he is I tell you, look at his boots. And how are all your people down at Celsius? Who told you my people come from Selsey? Never your mind. They did. How do you come to be up so far east? You were born in Lisson Grove. Oh, what arm is there in my leaving Lisson Grove?

It wouldn't fit for a big living. And I had to buy four on seas away. Live where you like, but stop that noise. come come he can't touch you you have a right to live where you please park lane for instance i'd like to go into the ars in question with you i would do you know where i come from hoxton well who said i didn't blimey you know everything you do ain't no call now of me ain't of me ain't of course he ain't don't you stand it from him what never offered to meddle with you where's your warrant yes where's your warrant them say we lies i'll want no truck with em you take us for dirt under your feet don't you catch you taking liberties with the gentleman yes tell him where he come from if you want to go fortune tell him cheltenham harrow cambridge and india quite right may i ask sir do you do this for your living at a music hall i've thought of that maybe i shall some day the rain has stopped and the persons on the outside of the crowd begin to drop off there's no gentleman i ain't doing fear with a poor girl

what on earth is freddie doing i shall get pneumonia if i stay in this draught any longer earl's court will you please keep your impertinent remarks to yourself did i say that out loud i didn't mean to i beg your pardon your mother's epsom unmistakably How very curious. I was brought up in Large Lady Park, near Epsom. What a devil of a name. Excuse me. We want a cab, do you? Don't dare speak to me. Oh, please, Clara.

We should be so grateful to you, sir, if you found us a cab. The note-taker produces a whistle. Oh, thank you. The note-taker blows a piercing blast. There, I know he was a little. a plain-clothes copper. That ain't a police whistle. That's a sporting whistle.

He's no right, tag away me, me carter. My character's same to me as any lydies. I don't know whether you've noticed it, but the rain stopped about two minutes ago. So it has. Why didn't you say so before?

And us losing our time listening to your silliness. I can tell where you come from, you come from Anwell. Go back there. Hanwell. Thank you, teacher. Ha, ha. So long.

Frightening people like that, howie like himself. It's quite fine now, Clara. We can walk to a motor-bus. Come. She gathers her skirts above her ankles, and hurries off toward the strand. But the cab? 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. Poor girl, I'd not for a live without being worried and chivie. How do you do it, if I may ask? 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. Or be ashamed of him of him. I'm Manick Cowan. But is there a living in that? 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 100,000. They want to drop Kentish Town, but they give themselves away every time they open their mouths. Now I can teach them. Let mind his own business and leave a poor girl. Woman, cease this detestable boo-hooing instantly

or else seek the shelter of some other place of worship. I've a right to be here if I like, same as you. 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 Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible, and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon. Heavens, what a sound! Ah!

You see this creature with her curbstone 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 a 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. I am myself a student of Indian dialects and... Are you? Do you know Colonel Pickering, the author of Spoken Sanskrit? I am Colonel Pickering. Who are you? Henry Higgins, author of Higgins Universal Alphabet.

I came from India to meet you. I was going to India to meet you. Where do you live? 27A Wimpole Street. Come and see me tomorrow. I'm at the Carlton. Come with me now and let's have a jaw over some supper. Right you are. Bar-flare, carne, gentlemen. I'm short for me. lodging. I really haven't any change. I'm sorry.

Liar, you said you could change half a crown. You ought be stuffed with nails, you ought. Tide the old bloomin basket for sixpence. The church clock strikes the second quarter. A reminder. He raises his hat solemnly, then throws a handful of money into the basket, and follows pickering. Picking up a half crown. Ow! Picking up a couple of florins.

Oh! Picking up several coins. Ow! Picking up a half sovereign. Oh! Freddy springs out of a taxi cab. Got one at last. Hello?

Where are the two ladies that were here? I walked with the bus when the rain stopped. And left me with a cab on my hands. Damnation. Never you mind, young man. I'm going home with 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. Hoping's ain't no object to me, Charlie. Angel court drew a lane round the corner of Mick of John's oil shop. Let's see how fast you can make her up it. Well, I'm dashed. End of Act 1. This recording is in the public domain. Act 2 of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. This is a Libervox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Act 2

Next day at 11 a.m. Higgins Laboratory in Wimple 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 India rubber 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 sidewall, 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 Pyrenees and Metzotint 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 likable even in his least reasonable moments. Well, I think that's the whole show.

It's really amazing. I haven't taken half of it in, you know. Would you like to go over any of it again? 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. Tired of listening to sounds? Yes, it's a fearful strain. I rather fancied myself because I can pronounce 24 distinct vowel sounds, but your 130 beat me. I can't hear a bit of difference between most of them. 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. Pierce looks in. She is Higgins's housekeeper. What's the matter? A young woman wants to see you, sir. A young woman? What does she want? 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 oh that's all right mrs pierce has she an interesting accent oh something dreadful sir really i don't know how you can take an interest in it let's have her up show her up mrs pierce

He rushes across to his working table and picks out a cylinder to use on the photograph. Very well, sir, it's for you to say. This is a bit of luck. I'll show you how I make records. We'll set her talking, and then I'll take it down first in Bell's visible speech, then in Broad Remic, 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. 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 him's the presence of Mrs. Pierce.

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 feather-weight cross, he coaxes women as it chokeses its nerve, when it wants to get anything out of her. Why, this is the girl I jotted down last night. She's no use.

I've got all the records I want of Listen Grove Lingo, and I'm not going to waste another cylinder on it. Be off with you. I don't want you. Don't you be so saucy. You ain't heard what I come for yet. Do you tell him I come in a taxi? Nonsense, girl. What, do you think a gentleman like Mr. Higgins cares what you came in?

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. Good enough for what? Good enough for you. Now you know, don't you? I'm come to have lessons I am, and to pay for them too make no mistake.

Well, what do you expect me to say to you? Well, if you was a gentleman, you might ask me to sit down, I think. Don't I tell you I'm bringing your business? Pickering, shall we ask this baggage to sit down? it down or shall we throw her out of the window? No! I won't be called to 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. What is it you want, my girl? I want to be a lady in a flare shop, instead 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 favour, and he treats me as if I was dirt.

How can you be such a foolish, ignorant girl as to think you could afford to pay, Mr. Higgins? Why shouldn't I? I know what lessons cost as well as you do, and I'm ready to pay. How much? 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. You'd had a drop in, ain't you? Sit down. Oh, if you're going to make a compliment of it. Sit down. 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. Oh! Won't you sit down? Don't mind if I do. What's your name? Liza Doolittle. Eliza, Elizabeth, Betty, and Bess, they went to the woods to get a bird's nest. They found a nest with four eggs in it.

They took one a piece and left three in it. Oh, don't be silly. You mustn't speak to the gentleman like that. Well, why won't he speak sensible to me? Come back to business. How much do you propose to pay me for the lessons? Oh, I know what's right. A lady friend of mine gets French lessons for 18 pence 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 n' shilling. Take it or leave it. 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 60 or 70 guineas from a millionaire.

How so? Figure it out. A millionaire has about 150 pounds a day. She earns about half a crown. Who told you, I'm... 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. Sixty pounds? What are you talking about? I never offered you £60? Where would I get... Hold your tongue. But I ain't got £60? Don't cry, you silly girl. Sit down. Nobody is going to touch your money.

Somebody is going to touch you with a broomstick if you don't stop snivelling. Sit down. One would think you was my father. If I decide to teach you, I'll be worse than two fathers to you. Here. He offers her his silk handkerchief. What's this for? 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 one for the other if you wish to become a lady in a shop. 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. He takes the handkerchief. Here, you give me that handkerchief. He give it to me, not to you. Ha, he did. I think it must be regarded as her property, Mrs. Pierce. serve you right, Mr. Higgins. 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 you for the lessons. Oh, you are real good. Thank you, Captain. It's almost irresistible. She's so deliciously low, so horribly dirty.

How? I ain't dirty. I wash my face and hands. a come or did you're certainly not going to turn her head with flattery higgins oh don't say that sir there's more ways than one if 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 what is life but a series 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 "'Oh!' "'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. Pierce. "'Monkey brand, if it won't come off any other way. "'Is there a good fire in the kitchen?' "'Yes, but—' "'Take all her clothes off and burn them.

"'Ring up whitely or somebody-fodew-wans. "'Wrap her up in brown paper till they come. "'You're no gentleman, you're not, "'to talk of such things. I'm a good girl I am And I know what the larker you are I do We want none of your Liston Grove

Prudery here young woman You've got to learn to behave like a duchess Take her away Mrs. Pierce If she gives you any trouble, wallop her No, I'll call the place I will But I've no place to put her Put her in the dust bin Oh

Oh come Higgins be reasonable You must be reasonable Mr Higgins Really you must You can't walk over everybody like this I will walk over everybody. My dear Mrs. Pierce, 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. Well, did you ever hear anything like that, sir? Never, Mrs. Never. What's the matter? 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.

Why not? Why not? But you don't know anything about her. What about her parents? She may be married. Gone! There, as the girl they properly says, gone. 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? Who'd marry me? Bar George, Eliza, the streets will be strewn with the bodies of men shooting themselves for your sake before I've done with you. Nonsense. You mustn't talk like that to her. I'm going away.

He's off as jumpy, he's. I don't want no balmy's teaching me. Oh, indeed. I'm mad, am I? Very well, Mrs. Pierce, you needn't order the new clothes for a thrower out. No, you've got no right to touch me. You see now what comes up being saucy. This way, please. I didn't want no clothes.

I wouldn't a tie in him. She throws away the handkerchief. I can bar my own clothes. Higgins deftly retrieves the handkerchief. and intercepts 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.

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. I ain't got no parents. They told me I was big enough to earn my own living and turn me out. Where's your mother? I ain't got no mother. Her it turned me out was my sixth stepmother, but I had done without him, and I'm a good girl I am.

Very well, then. What an earth is all this fuss about? The girl doesn't belong to anybody, is no use to anybody, but me. You can adopt her, Mrs. Pierce. I'm sure a daughter would be a great amusement to you. Now don't make any more fuss. Take her downstairs and— But what's to become of her? Is she to be paid anything? Do be sensible, sir. Oh, pay her whatever is necessary. Put it in the housekeeping book. What an earth will she want? with money. She'll have her food and her clothes. She'll only drink if you give her money. Oh, you are a brute. It's a lie.

Nobody ever saw a sign of liquor on me. She goes back to her chair and plants herself there defiantly. Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings? Oh no, I don't think so. Not any feelings we need bother about. Have you, Eliza? I got my feelings

same as anyone else. You see the difficulty? Eh, what difficulty? To get her to talk Grammar, the mere pronunciation is easy enough. I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady. 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. What's to become of her if I leave her in the gutter? Tell me that, Mrs. Pierce. That's her own business, not yours, Mr. Higgins. Well, when I've done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter. then it would be her own business again. So that's all right. Oh, you've no feeling heart in you. You don't care for nothing but yourself.

Here, I've had enough of this. I'm going. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you ought. Higgins snatches a chocolate cream from the piano, his eyes suddenly beginning to twinkle with mischief. Have some chocolates, Eliza. How do I know what might be in him? I've heard of girls being drug 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. 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, hmm? I wouldn't have ate it, only I'm too ladylike to take it out of my mouth. Listen, Eliza, I think that you said you came in a taxi. Well, what if I did? I've as good a right to take a tank.

taxi as anyone else? 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. Mr. Higgins, you're tempting the girl. It's not right. She should think of the future. 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. 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. You shall remain so, Eliza, under the care of Mrs. Pierce, 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. Excuse me, Higgins, but I really must interfere. Mrs. Pierce 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. How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we're doing? If we did, would we ever do it? Very clever, Higgins, but not sound sense. Miss Doolittle? Oh! There! That's all you get out of Eliza. Ow! 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 warripped by Mrs. Pierce 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 headwerews. will be cut off as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls. If you are not found out, she'll 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 with you. Now, are you satisfied, Pickering? Can I put it more plainly and fairly, Mrs. Pierce? 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. That's all right. Thank you, Mrs. Pierce. Bundle her off to the bathroom. You're a great bully you are. I won't stay here if I don't like it. I won't let nobody wallop me. I never asked to go to Buckham Palace. I didn't.

I was never in trouble with the police. not me. I'm a good girl. 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. As she goes out, Well, what I say is right, I won't go near the king, not if I'm going to have me 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. I never offered to say word to him,

and I don't own nothing, and I don't care, and I won't be put upon, and I have my feeling same as anyone else. Mrs. Pierce 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. Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned? Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned? Yes, very frequently. 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. At what, for example? 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 onto 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. So, I am, a confirmed old bachelor and likely to remain so.

Come, Higgins, you know what I mean. If I am to be in this business, I shall feel responsible for the girl. I hope it's understood that no advantage is to be taken off her position. What? That thing? Sacred, I assure you. You see, she'll be a pupil, and teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred. I've taught scores of American millionaireses 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. Pierce opens the door. She has Eliza's hat in her hand. Pickering retires to the easy chair and sits down. Well, Mrs. Pierce, is it all right? I just wish to trouble you with a word,

if I may, Mr. Higgins. Yes, certainly. Come in. Don't burn that, Mrs. Pierce. I'll keep it as a curiosity. He takes the hat. 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. Putting it down hastily on the piano. Oh, oh, thank you. Well, what have you to say to me? Am I in the way? Not at all, sir. Mr. Higgins, will you please be very particular what you say before the girl? Of course. I'm always particular about what I say. Why do you say this to me? 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

the girl. I swear? I never swear. I detest the habit. What the devil do you mean? 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. Really, Mrs. Pierce, this language from your lips. 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. I cannot charge myself with having ever uttered it, Mrs. Pierce. She looks at him steadfastly.

He adds, hiding an uneasy conscience with a judicial air, except perhaps at a moment of extreme and justifiable excitement. Only this morning, sir, you applied it to your boots, to the butter, and to the brown bread. Oh, that. Mere alliteration, Mrs. Pierce, natural to a poet. Well, sir, whatever you choose to do. to call it, I beg you not to let the girl hear you repeat it. Oh, very well, very well. Is that all?

No, sir. We shall have to be very particular with this girl as to personal cleanliness. Certainly, quite right, most important. I mean not to be slovenly about her dress or untidy in leaving things about. Just so. I intended to call your attention to that. It is these little things that matter-piggering take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves, as is true of personal habits as of money. yes sir then might i ask you not to come 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 to not 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.

I may do these things sometimes in absence of mind, but surely I don't do them habitually. By the way, my dressing-gown smells most damnably a benzene. No doubt it does, Mr. Higgins. But if you will wipe your fingers— Oh, very well, very well. I'll wipe them in my hair in future. I hope you're not offended Mr. Higgins. Not at all, not at all.

You're quite right, Mrs. Pierce. I shall be particularly careful before the goal. Is that all? 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. Certainly, anything you like. Is that all?

Thank you, sir. That's all. She goes out. 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. Pierce returns. 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. Fue, I say. Send the blackguard up. Oh, very well, sir. He may not be a blackguard, Higgins. "'Nonsense, of course he's a blaggart.' "'Whether he is or not, I'm afraid we shall have some trouble with him.' "'Oh, no, I think not not, 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.'

"'About the girl?' "'No, I mean his dialect.' "'Oh.' "'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 honour and stern resolution. Professor Riggins? Here, good morning, sit down. Morning, governor. I come a-beckon-lawful.

a very serious matter, Governor. Brought up in Hounslow. Mother Welsh, I should think. What do you want, do little? I want me daughter. That's what I want. See? Of course you do.

You're her father, aren't you? You don't suppose anybody else wants her, do you? I'm glad to see you'd have some spark of family feeling left. She's upstairs. Take her away at once. What? Take her away. Do you suppose I'm going to keep your daughter for you?

Now, now, look here, Governor. is this reasonable is it fair to take advantage of a man like this a girl belongs to me you got her now where do i come in your daughter had the audacity to come to my house and ask her how to teach her how to speak properly so that she could get a place in a flour shop this gentleman and my housekeeper have been here all the time how dare you come here and attempt to blackmail me you're sent her to her here on purpose. No, Governor. You must have. How else could you possibly know that she is here? Don't take a man up like that, Governor.

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. Have I asked you for a brass farving? I leave it to the gentleman here. Have I said a word about money? What else did you come for?

Well, what would a man come for? Be human, Governor. Alfred, did you put her up to it? So help me, Governor, I never did. I take me by-belo if I ain't seeing the girl these two months past. Then how did you know she was here? I'll tell you, Governor, if you'd 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. 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. Oh, please, Higgins, I'm West Country myself.

How did you know the girl was here if you didn't send her? It was like this, Governor. A girl took a boy in a taxi. to give him a jaunt. Son of her landlady 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 a corner a long acre and Endel Street. Public house, yes. A poor man's club governor. Why shouldn't I?

Do let him tell his story, Higgins. 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. Why didn't you go for it yourself? 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. How much luggage? musical instrument governor few pictures 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 so you came to rescue her from worse than death eh just so governor that's right but why did you bring her luggage if you intended to take her away have i said a word about taking her away? Have I now? You're going to take her away, double quick. He crosses to the hearth and rings the bell. No, Governor, don't say that. I'm not the man to stand in me girl's light. Here's a career opening for her, as you might say, and...

Mrs. Pierce opens the door and awaits orders. Mrs. Pierce, this is Eliza's father. He has come to take her away. Give her to him. no this is a misunderstanding listen here he can't take her away mr higgins how can he you told me to burn her clothes that's right i can't carry a girl through the streets like a blooming monkey can i i put it to you 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 where's the clothes she coming did i burn em or did your mrs here 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. Listen here, Governor. You amaze men at a world, ain't we? Oh, men of the world, are we? Who'd better go, Mrs. Piers? I think so. Indeed, sir. The floor is yours, Mr. Doolittle.

I thank you, Gavis. Well, the truth is, I've sort of taken a 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 of you? And what's a lise of me? I think you ought to know, Doolittle, that Mr Higgins' intentions are entirely honourable. Calls say, oh, Governor, if I thought they weren't, I'd ask fifty. Do you mean to say, you callous rascal, that you would sell your daughter for fifty pounds? Not in a general way I wouldn't, but to oblige a gentleman like you, I'd do a good deal, I'd do assure you. Have you no morals, man? Can't afford them, governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me. Not that I mean any arm, you know, but if Liza is going to have a bit out of this, why not me too?

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. That's it, Governor, that's all I say. A father's heart, as it were. Well, I know the feeling, but really it seems hardly right. 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 he's up again 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 widders 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, because 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, eh? 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 grown big enough to be interesting. Are you gentlemen? he's five pounds unreasonable i put it to you and i leave it to you 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 what do you say to that do little not be 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 the other amusements, and I tell you it's a dog's life any way you look at it. Undeserving poverty, that's 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. I suppose we must give him a favour.

He'll make a bad use of it, I'm afraid. 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 person. 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 port-barise me, you bet. Just one good spree for myself and a missus. Give him pleasure to ourselves and employment to others, and satisfaction to you to think it's not been thrown away. You couldn't spend it better. This is irresistible. Let's give him ten. He offers two notes to the dustman. No, Governor, she wouldn't have the art to spend ten.

And perhaps I shouldn't either. 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 for, Governor. Not a penny more and not a penny less. Why don't you marry that, Mrs of yours? I rather draw the line at encouraging that sort of immorality.

Tell her so, Governor, tell her so. I'm willing. It's me that suffers by it. I've got no hold on her. I've got to be reasonable to her. I've got to give her presents. I've got to buy her clothes, something sinful. I'm a slave to that woman, Governor,

just because I ain't her lawful husband. And she knows it, too. Catch her marrying me. Ha! 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. Pickering, if we listen to this man another minute, we shall have no convictions left. Five pounds, I think you said. Thank you kindly, Governor. You're sure you won't take ten?

Not now. Another time, Governor. Higgins hands him a five-pound note. Here you are. 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,

exquisitely clean, young Japanese lady, in a simple blue cotton kimono printed cunningly with small white jasmine blossoms. Mrs. Pierce is with her. He gets out of her way deferentially and apologizes. Big pardon, miss. Gone. Don't you know your own daughter? Blimey, Miss Eliza. Don't I look silly? Silly? Now, Mr. Higgins, please don't say anything to make the girl conceded about herself.

Oh, quite right, Mrs. Pierce. yes damn silly please sir i mean extremely silly i should look all right with me ad on she takes up her hat puts it on and walks across the room to the fireplace with a fashionable air a new fashion by george and it ought to look horrible well i never thought she'd clean up as good-looking as at gavner she's a credit to me ain't she i tell you it's easy to clean up here ot and cold water on tap just as much as you like there is is, woolly towels there is, and a towel oars 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 em. Wish they saw what it is for like a me. I'm glad the bathroom met with your approval. It didn't, not all of it. And I don't care ooey as me say it. Mrs. Pierce knows. What was wrong, Mrs. Pierce?

Oh, nothing, sir. It doesn't matter. I had a good mind to break it. I didn't know which way to look. But on a towel over it, I did. Over what? Over the looking glass, sir. Too little you've brought your daughter up too strictly. Me? I never brought her up at all,

except to give her a lick of her strap down 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. I'm a good girl I am, won't pick up no free and easy ways. Eliza, if you say again that you're a good girl, your father shall take you home. Not him. You don't know me, father. All he come here for was to touch you for some money to get

drunk on. Well, what else would I want money for? To put it in the plate of 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 get me, nanny or lip, and don't let me hear you giving his gentleman any of it, nice. or you'll hear about it from me see have you any further advice to give her before you go do little your blessing for instance no governor i ain't such a mug as to put up my children to all i know myself hard enough to hold em without that if you want eliza's mind improved governor you do it yourself with a strap so long gentlemen stop you'll come regularly to see your daughter it's your duty you know my brother is a and he could help you in your talks with her. Certainly. I'll come, Governor.

Not just this week, because I've got 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. Pierce, who disdains the salutation and goes out. He winks at Higgins, thinking him probably a fellow-suffer from Mrs. Pierce's difficult disposition, and follows her. Don't you believe the old liar? Eid is soon you set a bulldog on him as a clergyman. You won't see him again in Erie.

I don't want to, Eliza, do you? Nor 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. What is his trade, Eliza? Taking money out of other people's pockets into his own. His proper trades are navvy, and he works at us sometimes too, for exercise.

Andon's good money out. Ain't you going to call me Miss Doolittle anymore? I beg your pardon, Miss Doolittle. It was a slip of the tongue. Oh, I don't mind. Only it sounded so genteel. I should just like to take a taxi at 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 him, you know. Better wait till we get you something really fashionable. Besides, you shouldn't have cut your old... friends now that you have risen in the world. That's what we call snobbery. You don't call like a them me friends now, I should hope. They've took out me often enough with her ridicule when they had the chance, and now I mean to get a bit my own back. But if I'm to have fashionable clothes, I'll wait. I should like to have some. Mrs. Pierce 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. Now, Eliza, the new things have come for you to try on. Oh! She rushes out. Oh, don't rush about like that, girl. Pickering, we seem to have taken on a stiff job.

Higgins, we have. End of Act 2. Act 3 of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. This is a Libravox recording. all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox dot org act three 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 Bern-Jones, and her room, which is very unlike her son's room in Wimple Street, is not crowded with furniture and little tables and knick-knacks. In the middle of the room there is a big ottoman, and this, with the carpet, the Morris wallpapers, and the Morris-Chince 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 Grovena Gallery thirty years ago, the Byrne 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 Rosettean costumes, which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular aestheticism in the 1870s. 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. Henry, what are you doing here today? It's 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. Oh, bother. He throws the hat down on the table. Go home at once. I know, mother. I came on purpose.

But you mustn't. I'm serious, Henry. You offend all my friends. They stop coming whenever they meet you. Nonsense. I know I have no small talk, but people don't. mind? Oh, don't they? Small talk indeed. What about your large talk? Really, dear, you mustn't stay. I must. I have a job for you, a phonetic job. No use, dear. I'm sorry, but I can't get around 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. Well, this isn't a phonetic job. You said it was. Not your part of it. I've picked up a girl. Does that mean that some girl has picked you up?

Not at all, I don't mean a love affair. What a pity. Why? Well, you never fall in love with anyone under 45. When will you discover that there are some rather nice-looking young women about? Oh, I can't be bothered with young women. My idea of a lovable 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. Do you know what you would do if you really loved me, Henry? Oh, bother. What? Marry, I suppose. 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. She's coming to see you. I don't remember asking her. You didn't, I asked her. If you'd known her, you wouldn't have asked her. Indeed, why? Well, it's like this. She's a common flower girl.

I picked her off the curbstone. And invite her to my at home? Oh, that'll be all right. I've taught her to speak properly, and she has strict orders as to her behaviour. She's to keep to two subjects, the weather and everybody's health. Fine day and how do you do, you know,

and to not let herself get on things in general. That would be safe. Safe? To talk about our health, about our insides, perhaps about our outsides. How could you be so silly, Henry? Well, she must talk about something. 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 be able to pass her off as a Duchess than six months. I've started on her some months ago, and she's getting on like a heise 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.

That's satisfactory at all events. Well, it isn't, it isn't. What does that mean? 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. Mrs. and Miss Innsford Hill.

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 Seinford 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 straightened means. The daughter has acquired a gay air of being very much at home in society. the bravado of genteel poverty. How do you do? How do you do?

My son, Henry. Your celebrated son. I have so longed to meet you, Professor Higgins. Delighted. How do you do? I've seen you before somewhere. I haven't the ghost of an ocean where, but I've heard your voice. It doesn't matter.

You'd better sit down. I'm sorry to say that my celebrated son has no manners. You mustn't mind him. don't. Not at all. Oh, have I been rude? I didn't mean to be. The parlor made returns, ushering in Pickering. Colonel Pickering!

How do you do, Mrs. Higgins? So glad you've come. Do you know Mrs. Isford Hill? Miss Einford Hill? Has Henry told you what we've come for? We were interrupted, damn it. Oh, Henry, Henry, really? Are we in the way? No, no, you couldn't have come.

Unfortunately, we want you to meet a friend of ours. Yes, by George, we want two or three people. You'll do as well as anybody else. The parlour made returns, ushering Freddy. Mr. Innsford Hill! God of heaven, another of them. How do you do? Very good of you to come, Colonel Pickering.

How do you do? I don't think you know my son, Professor Higgins. How do you do? I'll take my oath I've met you before somewhere. Where was it? I don't think so. It doesn't matter, anyhow. Sit down.

well here we are anyhow and now what the devil are we going to talk about until eliza comes henry you are the life and soul of the royal society's soirees but really you're rather trying on more commonplace occasions am i very sorry why suppose i am you know ha ha ha ha ha i sympathise i haven't got any small talk if people would only be frank and say what they really think lord forbid But why? 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? Is it so very cynical? Cynical?

Who the Dickens said it was cynical? I mean, it wouldn't be decent. Oh, I'm sure you don't mean that, Mr. 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? What do you know of poetry?

What do you know of science? What does he know of art or science or anything else? What the devil do you imagine I know of philosophy? Or of manners, Henry. Miss Doolittle! 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 how do you do mrs higgins mr higgins told me i might come quite right i'm very glad indeed to see you how do you do miss do little Colonel Pickering, is it not? I feel sure we have met before, Mrs. Doolittle. I remember your eyes. How do you do? My daughter, Clara. How do you do?

How do you do? I've certainly had the pleasure. My son, Freddy. How do you do? By George, yes, it all comes back to me. Covent Garden. What a damn thing. Henry, please!

Don't sit on my writing table. You break it! Sorry. Higgins 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. With a train, do you think? 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. Ha ha! How awfully funny! What is wrong with that, young man? I bet I got it right. Killing.

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. My aunt died of influenza, so they said, but it's my belief they'd done the old woman in.

Done her in? Yes, 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 till she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon dear me

what call would a woman with that strength in her have to die of influenza what become of her noostra hat that should have come to me somebody pinched it and what i say is them as pinched it done her in what does doing her in mean oh that's the new small talk to do a peasant in means to kill them you surely don't believe that your aunt was killed do i not them she lived with would have killed her for a hat-pin let alone a hat but it can't have been right for your father to poor spirits down her throat like that it might have killed her 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 do you mean that he drank drank my word something chronic how dreadful for you not a bit it never did him no harm what i could see but then he did not keep it up regular on the burst, as you might say, from time to time, and always more agreeable when he'd 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 hast to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live with. 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. Here, what are you sniggering at? The new small talk. You do it so awfully well.

If I was doing it proper, what was you laughing at? Have I said anything I oughtn't? Not at all, Miss Doolittle. Well, that's a mercy anyhow. What I always say is... Ahem. Well, I must go. They all rise. Freddy goes to the door. So pleased to have met you. Goodbye.

Goodbye. Goodbye, Colonel Pickering. Goodbye, Miss Doolittle. Goodbye all. Are you walking across the park, Miss Doolittle? If so. Walk? Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi. Pickering gasps and sits down. Freddy goes out on the balcony to catch another glimpse of Eliza. Well, I really can't get used to the new ways.

Oh, it's all right, Mama, quite right. People will think we never go anywhere or see anybody if you're so old-fashioned. I dare say 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? 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. 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 well after that i think it's time for us to go oh yes we have three at homes to go to still good-bye mrs higgins good-bye colonel pickering good-bye professor higgins 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 i will good-bye such nonsense all this victorian prudery Such damned nonsense. Such bloody nonsense. Clara! She goes out radiant,

conscious of being thoroughly up to date, and is heard descending the stairs in a stream of silvery laughter. Well, I ask you. Goodbye. Goodbye. Would you like to meet Miss Doolittle again? Yes, I should most awfully.

Well, you know my days. Yes, thanks awfully. Goodbye. Goodbye, Mr. Higgins. Goodbye. Goodbye. It's no use. I shall never be able to bring myself to use that word. Don't. It's not compulsory, you know. You'll get on quite well without it.

Only Clara is so down on me if I'm not positively reeking with the latest slang. Goodbye. Goodbye. 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 door. 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 oh quite nice i shall always be delighted to see him thank you dear good-bye she goes out well is eliza presentable you silly boy of course she's not presentable she's a triumph of your eyes

of her dressmakers, 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. But don't you think something might be done? I mean something to eliminate the sanguinary element from her conversation? Not as long as she's in Henry's hands. Do you mean that my language is improper? No dearest, it would be quite proper, say, on a canal barge, but it would not be proper for her at a garden party. Well, I must say. 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 20 years ago. Oh, well, if you say

so, I suppose I don't always talk like a bishop. Colonel Pickering, will you tell me what is the exact state of things in Wimpole Street? Well, I've come to live here with Henry. We work together, my Indian dialects, and we think it more convenient. Quite so, I'll know all about that. It's an Excellent arrangement. But where does this girl live? With us, of course. Where would she live? But on what terms? Is she a servant? If not, what is she? I think I know what you mean, Mrs. 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. It remembers my appointments and so forth. How does your housekeeper get on with her? Mrs. Pierce? Oh, she's jolly glad to have 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? Yes, that's the formula. You don't think so. That's the end of every conversation about Eliza. 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. You certainly are a pretty pair of babies playing with your live doll. 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. 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. We keep records of every stage, dozens of gramophone discs and photographs. Yes, by George, it's the most absorbing experiment I ever tackled. She regularly fills our lives up, doesn't she pick? We're always talking Eliza. Teaching Eliza. Dressing Eliza. What? Inventing new Elizers. You know she has the most extraordinary quickness of ear. I assure you, my dear Mrs. Higgins, that girl. Just like a parrot. I've tried her with... Is a genius. She can play the piano quite beautifully. Every possible sort of sound that a human being can make. We have taken her to classical concerts and to music.

Continental dialects, African dialects, Hott and it's all the same to her. She plays everything. Clicks. Things it took me years to get hold of. She hears right off when she comes home, whether it's... Picks them up like a shot right away as if she had... Beethoven and Brahms or Lehaar and Lionel Moncton.

Been at it her whole life. Though six months ago she'd never as much as touched a piano. I beg your pardon. Sorry, when Pickering starts shouting, nobody can get a word in edgeways. Be quiet, Henry. Colonel Pickering, don't you realise that when Eliza walked into Wimpole Street, something walked in with her? Her father did, but Henry soon got rid of him.

Hmm, it would have been more to the point if her mother had. But as her mother didn't, something else did. But what? A problem. Oh, I see, the problem of how to pass her off as a lady. I'll solve that. problem i've half solved it already no you two infinitely stupid male creatures the problem of what's to be done with her afterwards i don't see anything in that she can go her own way with all the advantages i've given her the advantages of that poor woman who is 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 oh that'll be all right mrs higgins we'll find her some light employment. She's happy enough. Don't you worry about her. Goodbye.

Anyhow, there's no good bothering now. The thing's done. Goodbye, mother. There are plenty of openings. We'll do what's right. Goodbye. Let's take her to the Shakespeare exhibition at Earl's Court. Yes, let's. Her remarks will be delicious. She'll mimic all the people for it when we get her. Ripping. 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. is a sheet of paper from her stationary 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 end of act three act four of pygmalion by george bernard shaw this is a libervox recording all livervox recordings are in the public domain for more

information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Act for The Wimple Street Laboratory. Midnight. Nobody in the room. The clock on the mantelpiece strikes twelve. The fire is not a light. It is a summer night. Presently, Higgins and Pickering are heard on the stairs. I say, Pick, lock up, will you? I shan't be going out again. Right. Can Mrs. Pierce go to bed? We don't want anything more, do we? Lord no. Eliza opens the door and is seen on the lighted landing in an 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. also takes off his hat and overcoat, and is about to throw them on Higgins's when he hesitates. I say Mrs. Pierce will row if we leave these things lying about in the drawing-room. Oh, chuck them over the banisters into the hall. She'll find them there in the morning and put them away, all right. She'll think we were drunk. We are, slightly. Are there any letters?

I didn't look. Pickering takes the overcoats and hats, and goes downstairs. 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 letterbox in his hand. Only circulars in this coroneted Billy-Doo for you? He throws the circulars into the fender and posts himself on the hearthrug with his back to the grate. Glancing at the billet-dwa,

Moneylender. 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 oh lord what an evening what a crew what a silly tomfoolery 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 aren't they 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? Thank God it's over.

Eliza flinches violently, but they take no notice of her, and she recovers herself, and sits stonily as before. Were you nervous at the garden party? I was. Eliza didn't seem a bit nervous. Oh, she wasn't nervous.

I knew she should 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.

Oh, come, the garden party was frightfully exciting. My heart began beating like anything. 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 gorgeing 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. You've never been broken in properly to the social routine. 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. Yes, that's what drives me mad.

The silly people don't know their own silly business. However, it's over and done with, and now I can go to bed at last without dreading tomorrow. Eliza's beauty becomes murderous. I think I shall turn into. Still, it's been a great occasion, a triumph for you. Good night. Good night. Over his shoulder, at the door.

Put out the light. eliza and tell mrs pierce 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 in despairing wrath outside what the devil have i done with my He appears at the door. Liza snatches up the slippers and hurls 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.

What on earth? What's the matter? Get up. Anything wrong? 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. You won my bet. You, presumptuous insect, I won it. What did you throw these slippers at me for? 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?

The creature is nervous after all. Liza instinctively darts her nails at his face. Higgins catches her. wrists ah would you claw's in you cat how dare you show your temper to me sit down and be quiet he throws her roughly into the easy chair what's to become of me what's to become of me how the devil do i know what's to become of you what does it matter what becomes of you 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 those slippers Those slippers. I didn't think it made any difference now. A pause. Eliza, hopeless and crushed. Higgins, a little uneasy. Why have you begun going on like this? May I ask whether you complain of your treatment here?

No. Has anybody behaved badly to you? Colonel Pickering, Mrs. Pierce, any of the servants? No. I presume you don't pretend that I have treated you badly? No. I'm glad to hear it Perhaps you're tired after the strain of the day Will you have a glass of champagne?

No Thank you 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 There's nothing more to worry about No, nothing more for you to worry about Oh God I wish I was dead

Why? In heaven's name why Listen to me, Eliza. All this irritation is purely subjective. I don't understand. I'm too ignorant. 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. I heard your prayers. Thank God it's all over. Well, don't you thank God it's all over? Now you are free and can do what you like.

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? Oh, that's what worrying you, is it? He thrust 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 owe you. I should imagine you won't have much difficulty in settling yourself, somewhere or other, although I hadn't 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.

You see, Eliza, not all men are confirmed old bachelors like me in the colonel. Most men are the marrying sort, poor darrell's, 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 you 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. I dare say my mother could find some chap or other who would do very well. We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. What do you mean? 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. 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. What else am I to do? 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. "'You'll have to pay for all those togs you've 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'd 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.'

"'Your slippers.' "'Oh, yes, of course. You shied them at me. "'Before you go, sir.' dropping the slippers in his surprise at her calling him sir. Do my clothes belong to me or to Colonel Pickering? What the devil use would they be to Pickering? He might want them for the next girl you pick up to experiment on. Is that the way you feel towards us?

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. But what does it matter? Why need you start bothering about that in the middle of the night? I want to know what I may take away with me. I don't want to be accused of stealing. Stealing? You shouldn't have said that, Eliza. That shows a want of feeling. 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? You may take the whole damned houseful if you like, except the jewels. They're high. Will that satisfy you? Stop, please. She takes off her jewels. Will you take these to your room, please, and keep them safe? I don't want to run the risk of their being missing.

Hand them over. She puts them into his hands. If these belong to me instead of the jeweller, 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 takes a ring off. This ring isn't the jewelers. 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. Don't you hit me! 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. I'm glad. I've got a little of my own back. anyhow you have caused me to lose my temper a thing that has hardly ever happened to me before i prefer to say nothing more to-night i am going to bed you'd better leave a note for mrs pierce about the coffee for she won't be told by me damn mrs pierce 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 gutter-snipe 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 her knees on the hearth-rug to look for the ring.

End of Act 4. Act 5 of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Act 5. Mrs. Higgins' drawing room. She is at her writing table, as before.

The parlor-maid comes in. Mr. Henry, Mum, is downstairs with Colonel Pickering. Well, show them up. They're using the telephone, ma'am. Telephoning to the police, I think. What? Mr. Henry's in the state, Mom. I thought I better tell you.

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're finished with the police. I suppose he's lost something. Yes, ma'am. Go upstairs and tell Miss Doolittle that Mr. Henry and the Currower, colonel are here. Ask her not to come down until I send for her. Yes, ma'am. Higgins bursts in. He is, as the parlour-maid has said, in a state. Look here, mother, here's a confounded thing. Yes, dear, good morning. What is it? Eliza's bolted. You must have frightened her.

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 about seven this morning, and that fool Mrs. Pierce let her have them without telling me a word about it. What am I to do? Do with that, I'm afraid, Henry. The girl has a perfect right to leave if she chooses. 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. Good morning, Mrs. Higgins. Has Henry told you? What does that ass of an inspector say? Have you offered a reward?

You don't mean. to say you have set the police after Eliza? Of course. What are the police for? What else could we do? The inspector made a lot of difficulties. I really think he suspected us of some improper purpose. 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. But we want to find her. We can't let her go like this, you know, Mrs. Higgins. What were we to do? You have no more sense either of you than two children.

The parlour maid comes in and breaks off the conversation. Mr. Henry, a gentleman wants to see you very particular. He's been sent home from Wimbled Street. No bother. I can't see anyone now. Who is it? A Mr. Doolittle, sir. Doolittle? Do you mean the dustman? Disman? Oh no, sir. A gentleman. By George Pickett, some relative of her she's gone to.

somebody we know nothing about. Send him up, quick. Yes, sir. Gentile relatives. Now we shall hear something. Do you know any of her people? Only her father, the fellow we told you about. Mr. Doolittle. 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 se here do you see this you done this done what man this i tell you look at it look at this coat has eliza been buying you clothes eliza not she not half why would she buy me clothes good morning mr doolittle won't you sit down taken aback as he becomes conscious that he has forgotten his hostess asking your pardon ma'am he approaches her and shakes her pro-offered hand thank you he sits down on the ottoman on pickering's right i'm not full of what's happened to me i can't think of anything else what the dickens has happened to you i shouldn't mind if you had only happened to me anything might happen to anybody and nobody a blame but Providence, as you might say. But this is something that you done to me. Yes, you, Henry Higgins.

Have you found her, that's the point? Have you lost her? You have all the luck you have. I ain't found her, but she'll find me quick enough now after what you'd done to me. But what has my son done to you, Mr. Doolittle? Done to me.

Ruin me. Destroyed me happiness. Tied me up. and delivered me into the hands of middle-class morality. 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. 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. What? Ezra D. Wannefella? He's dead. Yeah, 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. Oh, after your last visit, I remember making some silly joke of the kind. 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 recognise and respect merit in every class of life, however humble. Then words is in his blooming will,

in which, Henry Higgins, thanks to your silly joking, he leaves me a share in his predigested cheese trust, were three fars and a year, on condition that I lecture for his won a fellow moral reform world league, as often as they ask me, up to six times a year. The devil he does. What a lark. A safe thing for you, Doolittle, they won't ask you twice. It ain't a lecture in her mind.

I'll lecture and blue in the face I will not turn her air. It's making a gentleman of me, I object, too. 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'm warriated, tied neck and eels,

and everybody touches me for money. It's a fine thing for you, says me, 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 good thing, 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 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 ass, I'm not let Duan's turn for myself. Somebody else must do it and touch me for 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 be anxious. I bet she's on my doorstep by this. She that could support herself easy by selling flowers if I were weren'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 improper English. That's where you'll come in, and I dare say that's what you done it for. But, my dear Mr Doolittle, you need not suffer all this if you really are in earnest. Nobody can force you to accept this bequest. You can repudiate it, isn't that so, Colonel Pickering? I believe so. "'That's the tragedy of it, ma'am.

"'It's easy to say chuck it, but I ain'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 in, "'but a work-ass in my old age? "'I have to dye my air 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? "'A cause 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 year blasted three thousand a year "'that shoves me into the middle class. "'Oh, 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 world, workhouse and the char-biddies of the middle class, and I ain't the nerve for the workhouse. Intimidated, that's what I am. Broke, bull up.

Appy a men than me will call for me 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. Well, I'm very glad you're not going to do anything foolish, Mr Doolittle, for this self is a problem of Eliza's future. You can provide for her now. Yes, ma'am. I'm expected to provide for everyone now, out of three fash and a year. 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. Do little, either you're an honest man or a rogue. A little of both, Henry, like the rest of us, a little of both. Well, you took that money for the girl and you have no right to take her as well.

Henry, don't be absurd. If you really want to know where Eliza is, she's upstairs. Upstairs? Then I shall jolly soon fetch her downstairs. Be quiet, Henry. Sit down. I... Sit down, dear, and listen to me. Oh, very well, very well, very well. But I think you might have told me this half an hour ago. 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.

What? 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. Higgins, do you bully her after I went to bed? 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 utter word, and used perfectly awful language. But why? What did we do to her? I think I know pretty well what you did. The girl is naturally rather affectionate, I think. Isn't she Mr. Doolittle?

Very tender art in, ma'am. Takes after me. Just so. She became attached to you both. She worked very hard for you, Henry. I don't think you quite realize what anything in the nature of brainwork 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 over and how you had been bored with the whole thing.

And then you were surprised because she threw her slippers at you? I should have thrown the fire-irons at you. We said nothing except that we were tired and wanted to go to bed, did we pick? That was all. Quite sure? Absolutely. Really, that was all. You didn't thank her, or pet her, or admire her, or tell her how splendid she'd been.

But she knew all about that. We didn't make speeches to her, if that's what you mean. Perhaps we were a little inconsiderate. Is she very angry? Well, I'm afraid she won't go back to Wimposter. especially now that Mr Doolittle is able to keep up the position you have thrust on her. But she says she's quite willing to meet you on friendly terms and let bygones be bygones. Is she by George?

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. Oh, all right, very well. Pick, you behave yourself. Let us put on our Sunday best manners for this creature that we have picked out of the mud. now now henry higgins have some consideration for my feelings as a middle-class man remember your promise henry 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's made up with these two gentlemen would you mind as you wish lady anything to help henry keep her off me hands the parlour-maid answers the bell pickering sits down in dune little's place Ask Miss Doolittle to come down, please.

Yes, ma'am. Now, Henry, be good. I am behaving myself perfectly. He's doing his best, Mrs. Higgins. Henry, dearest, you don't look at all nice in that attitude. I was not trying to look nice, mother. It doesn't matter, dear, I only wanted to make you speak. Why?

Because you can't speak and whistle at the same time. 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. How do you do, Professor Higgins?

Are you quite well? Am I? But of course you are. You are never ill. So glad to see you again, Colonel Pickering. quite chilly this morning isn't it 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 very nicely put indeed henry no woman could resist such an invitation you let her alone mother let her speak for herself you will johnny 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 yes dear but you'll sit down won't you will you drop me altogether now that the experiment is over colonel pickering oh don't you mustn't think of it as an experiment it shocks me somehow

oh i'm only a squashed cabbage leaf no but i owe so much to you that i should be very unhappy if you forgot me it's very kind of you to say so miss doolittle 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 learned 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 well oh that's only his way you know he doesn't mean it 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 no doubt still he taught you to speak i couldn't have done that you know of course that is his profession damnation 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? What? You're calling me Miss Doolittle that day when I first came to Wimpole Street. That was the beginning of self-respect for me. 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. Oh, that was nothing. Yes. Things that did. showed you thought and felt about me as if I was 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. You mustn't mind that. Higgins takes off his boots all over the place. I know. I'm not blaming him. It is his way, isn't it? But it made such a difference to me that you didn't to 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 is 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 please don't grind your teeth henry well this is really very nice of you miss doolittle i should like you to call me eliza now if you would thank you eliza of course and i should like professor higgins to call me miss doolittle i'll see you damned first henry henry

why don't you slang back at him don't stand it it would do him a lot of good 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 Tottenhamcourt Road. Wimpole Street finishes it. Oh, but you're coming back to Wimpole Street, aren't you? You'll forgive Higgins.

Forgive? Will she by George? Let her go. Let her find out how she can live 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. He's incorrigible, Eliza.

relapse, will you? 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 the left shoulder. She drops her work losing her self-possession utterly at the spectacle of her father's splendor. Oh! Just so. Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Victory! Victory! Can you? You blame the girl? Don't look at me like that, Eliza. It ain't my fault. I've come into money.

You must have touched a millionaire this time, Dad. I have. But I'm dressed something special today. I'm going to St. George's Annover Square. Your stepmother is going to marry me. You're going to let yourself down to marry that low, common woman? He ought to, Eliza. Why has she changed her mind?

Intimidated, Governor. intimidated middle-class morality claims its victim won't you put on your atlyzer and come and see me turned off if the colonel says i must i-i'll i'll demean myself and get insulted for my pains like enough don't be afraid she never comes to words with any one now poor woman respectabilities broke all the spirit out of her be kind to them eliza make the best of it oh well just to show there's no ill feeling i'll be back in a moment i feel uncommon nervous about the ceremony colonel i wish you'd come and see me through it but you've come through it before man you were married to eliza's mother who told you that colonel well nobody told me but i concluded naturally nah 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. Quite right, we'll leave it so if you don't mind. And you'll come to the church, Colonel, and put me through straight.

With pleasure as far as a bachelor can. May I come, Mr. Doolittle? I should be very sorry to miss your wedding. I should indeed be honoured by your condescension, ma'am. And my poor old woman would take it as a tremendous compliment. She's been very low, thinking of the Appie days that are no more. I'll order a carriage and get ready. I shan't be more than fifteen minutes. As she goes to the door, Eliza comes in, hatted and buttoning her gloves. I am going to the church to see your father married, Eliza.

You had better come in the problem with me. Colonel Pickering, you 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. Bridegroom, what a word. It makes a man realise his position somehow. He takes up his hat and goes towards the door. Before I go, Eliza, do forgive him and come back to us. I don't think Papa would allow me, would you, Dad?

I played you off very cunning, Eliza, them two sportsmen. If it had a bit of, been only one of them you could have nailed him but you see there was two and one of them shaperone the other as you might say it was artful of you colonel but i bear no malice i should have done the same myself i've been the victim of one woman after another all me 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. 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.

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? You want me back only to pick up your slivers and put up with your tempers and fetch and carry for you. I haven't said I wanted you back at all. Oh, indeed.

Then what are we talking about? 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. That's not true. he treats a flower-girl as if she was a duchess and i treat a duchess as if she was a flower-girl i see the same to everybody just so like father 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 the great secret eliza is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners but have had been very 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 is no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another. Amen, you are a born preacher. The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you ever heard me treat anyone else better. I don't care how you treat me. I don't mind you're swearing at me. I don't mind a black eye. I've had one before this. But I won't be passed over. Then get out of my way, for I won't stop you. You talk about me as if I were a motor-bus. So you are a motor-bus.

All bounce and go in no consideration for anyone. But I can do without you. Don't think I can't. I know you can. I told you you could. I know you did, you brute. You wanted to get rid of me. Liar.

Thank you. You never asked yourself, I suppose, whether I could do without you. Don't you try to get round me. You'll have to do without me. I can do without anybody. I have my own soul, my own spark of divine fire, but... I shall miss you, Eliza. 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. Well, you have both of them on your gramophone in your book of photographs.

When you feel lonely without me, you can turn the machine on. It's got no feelings to hurt. 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. 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. Pius 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 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 could you or anyone ask

I won't care for anybody that doesn't care for me commercial principles Eliza like you're in violence in it don't sneer at me it's mean to sneer at me 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 you're slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for. 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 dared to set up

your little dog-tricks of fetching and carrying slippers against my creation of a Duchess Eliza, I'll slam the door in your silly face. What did you do it for if you didn't care for me? Why? Because it was my job. You never thought of the trouble it would make for me. Would the world ever have been made if you were, if you were you? 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 troubles and people killed. I'm no preacher. I don't notice things like that. I notice that you

don't notice me. 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 carrying two-pence 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. What am I to come back for? For the fun of it. That's why I took you on. And you may throw me out tomorrow if I don't do everything you want me to. Yes, and you may walk out tomorrow if I don't do everything you want me to do. And live with my stepmother. Yes, or sell flowers. 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. Not a bit. I'll adopt you as my daughter and settle money on you, if you like. Or would you rather marry Pickering? I wouldn't marry you, if you asked me, and you're nearer my age than what he is.

Than he is, not than what he is. I'll talk as I like. You're not my teacher. teacher now. I don't suppose Pickering would, though. He's as confirmed an old bachelor as I am. 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. Damn his impudence. He has a right to if he likes, poor lad, and he does love me.

You have no right to encourage him. Every girl has a right to be loved. What? By fools like that? He's not a fool. And if he's weak and poor and wants me, maybe he'd make me happier than my betters that bully me and don't want to me. Can he make anything of you? That's the point. 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.

In short, you want me to be as infatuated about you as Freddy. Is that it? 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 easily enough, and they wish each other dead the next minute. Of course they do, then what in thunder are we quarreling about? 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'd done—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. Well, of course, that's just how I feel, and how Pickering feels. Eliza, you're a fool. That's not a proper answer to give me. It's all you'll get until you stop being a common idiot. If you are going to be a lady, you'll have to give up feeling neglected

if the men you know don't spend half their time sniveling 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 till you are more abrute than a human being, and then cuddle and squabble and drink till you fall asleep. Oh, it's a fine life, the life of the gutter. It's real, it's warm, it's violent, and 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 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 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 fathers. 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. 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. 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. Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. 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. What'll you teach in heaven's name?

What you taught me? I'll teach phonetics. Ha! I'll offer myself as an assistant to profess an Epine. What? That imposter, that humbug, that todeing 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? Ring 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. Ah!

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. Ah, that's done you, Henry Higgins, it has. Now I don't care that for your bullying in your big talk.

I'll advertise 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. You damned imp you don't slut you. But it's better than sniveling, better than fetching slippers and finding spectacles, isn't it?

By George Elizer, I said I'd make a woman of you and I have. I like you like this. Yes. You turn round and make up to me now that I'm not afraid of you and can do without you. Of course I do you, little fool. Five minutes ago you were like a mill. stone around my neck now you're a tower of strength a consort battleship you and iron pickering will be three old battlers together instead of only two men and a silly girl mrs higgins returns dressed for the wedding eliza instantly becomes cool and elegant the carriage is waiting eliza are you ready quite is the professor coming certainly not he can't behave himself in church he makes remarks out loud all the time in the clergyman's pronunciation then i shall not see you again professor good-bye good-bye dear good-bye mother 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 eelan binmans you can choose the colour

buy them yourself she sweeps out i'm afraid you've spoiled that girl henry but never mind dear i'll buy you the tie and glove Oh, don't bother. She'll buy them all right enough. Goodbye. They kiss. Mrs. Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his couch in his pocket, chuckles, and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.

End of Act 5. Conclusion 2 Pigmalion by George Bernard Shaw. This is a Libravox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. The rest of our 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 rag-shop 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 record seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynn 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 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 coqueting. 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 and ever, 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 this 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 affecting 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' 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 he was a woman. To

she would be his nearest and fondest and warmest interest. Even had there be 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' dominion'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. Freddy Einsford 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 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 boar. 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 boring. 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 Freddie and Higgins? Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins' slippers? Or to a lifetime of Freddie 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.

Mary 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 Large Lady Park, had enabled her to struggle along in Earl's Court with an air of gentility, but not to procure any serious secondary education for her children, much to be able to, less give the boy a profession. A clerkship at thirty stillings 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 de classé 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. Seinford Hill to live in Earl's Court 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. Einseford Hill, would have spent a penniless honeymoon, but for a wedding present of five hundred 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, five hundred pounds will not last two young people forever, and they both knew, and Eliza felt as well, that they must shift for themselves in the end. She could court her herself on Wimpole Street because it had come to be her home, but she was quite aware that she ought not to court her 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. Please, as to Freddy's character, and the moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were lost on Higgins. He denied that Freddie 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 on 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 his 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. "'Freddie 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 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 so many years to a 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 conversation 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 worse, 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 had called a carriage lady, had no exchange value, apparently. It prevented her from getting educated, because the only education she could have afforded

was education with the Earl's Court 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 even afford a housemaid, and had to have to be able to afford a housemaid, and had to scrape along at home with an illiberly treated general servant. Under such circumstances nothing could give her an air of being a genuine product of Large Lady 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 practice 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 eye-opener 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 affected 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 become 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 of characters. They made her read Galsworthy, and Galsworthy exposed the vanity of Large Lady 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. act. 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 newborn Wellesian 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 Earl's Court, 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 large Lady 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 Wellesian. 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 ration 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 a 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 Freddie, 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 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' 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 check-book and a bank-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 his, him so often, and stung by the uproarious derision of Higgins, to whom the notion of Freddie succeeding at anything was like a joke that never pauled, 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 Dekensian 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 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 stationary as anyone else because certain qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to her. She would 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 forever. 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 a 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 weekends in the country cost them nothing, and saved them the price of their Sunday dinners, for the motor-car was the colonels, 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 Einsford Hill, Esquire.

Not that there was any swank about him. Nobody but Eliza knew that he had been christened Frederick Chaloner. Eliza herself swanked like anything. That is all. That is how it is turned out. It is astonishing how much Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimple 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 bed 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 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's slippers. Yet she has a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper than the infatuation. of common souls. She is immensely interested in him. She even has 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. End of the conclusion to Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.