George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

tongue at him. He is so incensed by this that Pickering presently
finds it necessary to step between them]. Don’t you give me
none of your lip; and don’t let me hear you giving this gentle-
man any of it neither, or you’ll hear from me about it. See?
HIGGINS
. Have you any further advice to give her before
you go, Doolittle? Your blessing, for instance.
DOOLITTLE
. No, Governor: I ain’t such a mug as to put
up my children to all I know myself. Hard enough to hold
them in without that. If you want Eliza’s mind improved,
Governor, you do it yourself with a strap. So long, gentle-
men. [He turns to go].
HIGGINS 
[impressively] Stop. You’ll come regularly to see
your daughter. It’s your duty, you know. My brother is a
clergyman; and he could help you in your talks with her.
DOOLITTLE 
[evasively] Certainly. I’ll come, Governor. Not
just this week, because I have a job at a distance. But later on
you may depend on me. Afternoon, gentlemen. Afternoon,
ma’am. [He takes off his hat to Mrs. Pearce, who disdains the
salutation and goes out. He winks at Higgins, thinking him
probably a fellow sufferer from Mrs. Pearce’s difficult disposi-
tion, and follows her].
LIZA
. Don’t you believe the old liar. He’d as soon you set a
bull-dog on him as a clergyman. You won’t see him again in

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41
Shaw
a hurry.
HIGGINS
. I don’t want to, Eliza. Do you?
LIZA
. Not me. I don’t want never to see him again, I don’t.
He’s a disgrace to me, he is, collecting dust, instead of work-
ing at his trade.
PICKERING
. What is his trade, Eliza?
LIZA
. Talking money out of other people’s pockets into his
own. His proper trade’s a navvy; and he works at it some-
times too—for exercise—and earns good money at it. Ain’t
you going to call me Miss Doolittle any more?
PICKERING
. I beg your pardon, Miss Doolittle. It was a
slip of the tongue.
LIZA
. Oh, I don’t mind; only it sounded so genteel. I should
just like to take a taxi to the corner of Tottenham Court
Road and get out there and tell it to wait for me, just to put
the girls in their place a bit. I wouldn’t speak to them, you
know.
PICKERING
. Better wait til we get you something really
fashionable.
HIGGINS
. Besides, you shouldn’t cut your old friends now
that you have risen in the world. That’s what we call snob-
bery.
LIZA
. You don’t call the like of them my friends now, I should
hope. They’ve took it out of me often enough with their
ridicule when they had the chance; and now I mean to get a
bit of my own back. But if I’m to have fashionable clothes,
I’ll wait. I should like to have some. Mrs. Pearce says you’re
going to give me some to wear in bed at night different to
what I wear in the daytime; but it do seem a waste of money
when you could get something to show. Besides, I never could
fancy changing into cold things on a winter night.
MRS. PEARCE 
[coming back] Now, Eliza. The new things
have come for you to try on.
LIZA
. Ah—ow—oo—ooh! [She rushes out].
MRS. PEARCE 
[following her] Oh, don’t rush about like
that, girl [She shuts the door behind her].
HIGGINS
. Pickering: we have taken on a stiff job.
PICKERING 
[with conviction] Higgins: we have.

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42
Pygmalion
ACT III
It is Mrs. Higgins’s at-home day. Nobody has yet ar-
rived. Her drawing-room, in a flat on Chelsea embank-
ment, 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, giv-
ing access to a balcony with flowers in pots. If you
stand with your face to the windows, you have the
fireplace on your left and the door in the right-hand
wall close to the corner nearest the windows.
Mrs. Higgins was brought up on Morris and Burne
Jones; and her room, which is very unlike her son’s
room in Wimpole Street, is not crowded with furni-
ture and little tables and nicknacks. In the middle of
the room there is a big ottoman; and this, with the
carpet, the Morris wall-papers, and the Morris chintz
window curtains and brocade covers of the ottoman
and its cushions, supply all the ornament, and are
much too handsome to be hidden by odds and ends
of useless things. A few good oil-paintings from the
exhibitions in the Grosvenor Gallery thirty years ago
(the Burne Jones, not the Whistler side of them) are
on the walls. The only landscape is a Cecil Lawson
on the scale of a Rubens. There is a portrait of Mrs.
Higgins as she was when she defied fashion in her
youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes
which, when caricatured by people who did not un-
derstand, led to the absurdities of popular estheti-
cism in the eighteen-seventies.
In the corner diagonally opposite the door Mrs.
Higgins, now over sixty and long past taking the
trouble to dress out of the fashion, sits writing at an
elegantly simple writing-table with a bell button within
reach of her hand. There is a Chippendale chair fur-
ther back in the room between her and the window
nearest her side. At the other side of the room, fur-
ther 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 fire-
place and the window is occupied by a divan cush-
ioned in Morris chintz.

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43
Shaw
It is between four and five in the afternoon.
The door is opened violently; and Higgins enters
with his hat on.
MRS. HIGGINS 
[dismayed] Henry [scolding him]! What are
you doing here to-day? It is my at home day: you promised
not to come. [As he bends to kiss her, she takes his hat off, and