George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

ottoman with her face to the hearth] I know you did, you
brute. You wanted to get rid of me.
HIGGINS
. Liar.

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78
Pygmalion
LIZA
. Thank you. [She sits down with dignity].
HIGGINS
. You never asked yourself, I suppose, whether I
could do without YOU.
LIZA 
[earnestly] Don’t you try to get round me. You’ll HAVE
to do without me.
HIGGINS 
[arrogant] I can do without anybody. I have my
own soul: my own spark of divine fire. But [with sudden
humility] I shall miss you, Eliza. [He sits down near her on the
ottoman]. I have learnt something from your idiotic notions:
I confess that humbly and gratefully. And I have grown ac-
customed to your voice and appearance. I like them, rather.
LIZA
. Well, you have both of them on your gramophone
and in your book of photographs. When you feel lonely with-
out me, you can turn the machine on. It’s got no feelings to
hurt.
HIGGINS
. I can’t turn your soul on. Leave me those feel-
ings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are
not you.
LIZA
. Oh, you ARE a devil. You can twist the heart in a girl
as easy as some could twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs. Pearce
warned me. Time and again she has wanted to leave you;
and you always got round her at the last minute. And you
don’t care a bit for her. And you don’t care a bit for me.
HIGGINS
. I care for life, for humanity; and you are a part
of it that has come my way and been built into my house.
What more can you or anyone ask?
LIZA
. I won’t care for anybody that doesn’t care for me.
HIGGINS
. Commercial principles, Eliza. Like [reproducing
her Covent Garden pronunciation with professional exactness]
s’yollin voylets [selling violets], isn’t it?
LIZA
. Don’t sneer at me. It’s mean to sneer at me.
HIGGINS
. I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn’t
become either the human face or the human soul. I am ex-
pressing 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 find-
ing my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman fetching
a man’s slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch YOUR
slippers? I think a good deal more of you for throwing them
in my face. No use slaving for me and then saying you want
to be cared for: who cares for a slave? If you come back,
come back for the sake of good fellowship; for you’ll get noth-
ing else. You’ve had a thousand times as much out of me as I

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79
Shaw
have out of you; and if you dare to set up your little dog’s
tricks of fetching and carrying slippers against my creation
of a Duchess Eliza, I’ll slam the door in your silly face.
LIZA
. What did you do it for if you didn’t care for me?
HIGGINS 
[heartily] Why, because it was my job.
LIZA
. You never thought of the trouble it would make for
me.
HIGGINS
. Would the world ever have been made if its maker
had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means mak-
ing trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and
that’s killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shriek-
ing to have troublesome people killed.
LIZA
. I’m no preacher: I don’t notice things like that. I no-
tice that you don’t notice me.
HIGGINS 
[jumping up and walking about intolerantly] Eliza:
you’re an idiot. I waste the treasures of my Miltonic mind by
spreading them before you. Once for all, understand that I
go my way and do my work without caring twopence what
happens to either of us. I am not intimidated, like your fa-
ther and your stepmother. So you can come back or go to
the devil: which you please.
LIZA
. What am I to come back for?
HIGGINS 
[bouncing up on his knees on the ottoman and lean-