Pygmalion

This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected by Freddy's

mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions into those artistic

circles which were the highest within her reach, discovered that her

conversational qualifications were expected to include a grounding in

the novels of Mr. H.G. Wells. She borrowed them in various directions

so energetically that she swallowed them all within two months. The

result was a conversion of a kind quite common today. A modern Acts of

the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles if anyone were capable of

writing it.

Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as a disagreeable

and ridiculous person, and to her own mother as in some inexplicable

way a social failure, had never seen herself in either light; for,

though to some extent ridiculed and mimicked in West Kensington like

everybody else there, she was accepted as a rational and normal--or

shall we say inevitable?--sort of human being. At worst they called her

The Pusher; but to them no more than to herself had it ever occurred

that she was pushing the air, and pushing it in a wrong direction.

Still, she was not happy. She was growing desperate. Her one asset, the

fact that her mother was what the Epsom greengrocer called a carriage

lady had no exchange value, apparently. It had prevented her from

getting educated, because the only education she could have afforded

was education with the Earlscourt green grocer's daughter. It had led

her to seek the society of her mother's class; and that class simply

would not have her, because she was much poorer than the greengrocer,

and, far from being able to afford a maid, could not afford even a

housemaid, and had to scrape along at home with an illiberally treated

general servant. Under such circumstances nothing could give her an air

of being a genuine product of Largelady Park. And yet its tradition

made her regard a marriage with anyone within her reach as an

unbearable humiliation. Commercial people and professional people in a

small way were odious to her. She ran after painters and novelists; but

she did not charm them; and her bold attempts to pick up and practise

artistic and literary talk irritated them. She was, in short, an utter

failure, an ignorant, incompetent, pretentious, unwelcome, penniless,

useless little snob; and though she did not admit these

disqualifications (for nobody ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind

until the possibility of a way out dawns on them) she felt their

effects too keenly to be satisfied with her position.

Clara had a startling eyeopener when, on being suddenly wakened to

enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who dazzled her and produced in her

a gushing desire to take her for a model, and gain her friendship, she

discovered that this exquisite apparition had graduated from the gutter

in a few months' time. It shook her so violently, that when Mr. H. G.

Wells lifted her on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at

the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society

to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs

and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a conviction

of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of General Booth or

Gypsy Smith. Clara's snobbery went bang. Life suddenly began to move

with her. Without knowing how or why, she began to make friends and

enemies. Some of the acquaintances to whom she had been a tedious or

indifferent or ridiculous affliction, dropped her: others became

cordial. To her amazement she found that some "quite nice" people were

saturated with Wells, and that this accessibility to ideas was the

secret of their niceness. People she had thought deeply religious, and

had tried to conciliate on that tack with disastrous results, suddenly

took an interest in her, and revealed a hostility to conventional

religion which she had never conceived possible except among the most

desperate characters. They made her read Galsworthy; and Galsworthy

exposed the vanity of Largelady Park and finished her. It exasperated

her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many

unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she

had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping

well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have

come into any sort of sincere human contact. In the radiance of these

discoveries, and the tumult of their reaction, she made a fool of

herself as freely and conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted

Eliza's expletive in Mrs. Higgins's drawing-room; for the new-born

Wellsian had to find her bearings almost as ridiculously as a baby; but

nobody hates a baby for its ineptitudes, or thinks the worse of it for

trying to eat the matches; and Clara lost no friends by her follies.

They laughed at her to her face this time; and she had to defend

herself and fight it out as best she could.