Pygmalion

Next day at 11 a.m. Higgins's laboratory in Wimpole 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 indiarubber 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 side wall, 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

Piranesis and mezzotint 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 likeable

even in his least reasonable moments.