from
Pygmalion
by
Bernard Shaw

Pickering:
Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?

Higgins:
Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?

Pickering:
Yes: very frequently.

Higgins:
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.

Higgins:
You know, Pickering, that woman has the most extraordinary ideas about me. Here I am, a shy, diffident sort of man. I’ve never been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like other chaps. And yet she’s firmly persuaded that I’m an arbitrary overbearing bossing kind of person. I can’t account for it.

Doolittle:
[...] I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor, that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.” But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more.

Pickering:
He’ll make bad use of it, I’m afraid.

Doolittle:
Not me, Governor, so help me I won’t. Don’t you be afraid that I’ll save it and spare it and live idle on it. There won’t be a penny of it left by Monday: I’ll have to go to work same as if I’d never had it. It won’t pauperize me, you bet. Just one good spree for myself and the missus, giving pleasure to ourselves and employment to others, and satisfaction to you to think it’s not been throwed away. You couldn’t spend it better.

Doolittle:
[...] Ten pounds is a lot of money: it makes a man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what I ask you, Governor: not a penny more, and not a penny less.

Higgins:
Do you mean that my language is improper?

Mrs. Higgins:
No, dearest: it would be quite proper—say on a canal barge; but it would not be proper for her at a garden party.

Liza:
I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else.

Doolittle:
[...] 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, Enry Iggins. Now I am worrited; tied neck and heels; and everybody touches me for money.

Pickering:
Oh, that’s only his way, you know. He doesn’t mean it.

Liza:
Oh, I didn’t mean it either, when I was a flower girl. It was only my way. But you see I did it; and that’s what makes the difference after all.

Liza:
[...] You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

Pickering:
But you’ve been through it before, man. You were married to Eliza’s mother.

Doolittle:
Who told you that, Colonel?

Pickering:
Well, nobody told me. But I concluded—naturally—

Doolittle:
No: that ain’t the natural way, Colonel: it’s only the middle class way. My way was always the undeserving way.

Higgins:
Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.

Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it.