Pygmalion

This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza fairly sure to do

when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look forward to

a lifetime of fetching Higgins's slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy

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, marry 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 Largelady Park, had enabled her to struggle along in

Earlscourt with an air of gentility, but not to procure any serious

secondary education for her children, much less give the boy a

profession. A clerkship at thirty shillings 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 declassee 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. Eynsford Hill to live in Earlscourt 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. Eynsford Hill, would have spent

a penniless honeymoon but for a wedding present of 500 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, 500 pounds will not last two

young people for ever; and they both knew, and Eliza felt as well, that

they must shift for themselves in the end. She could quarter herself on

Wimpole Street because it had come to be her home; but she was quite

aware that she ought not to quarter Freddy there, and that it would not

be good for his character if she did.