Pygmalion

When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he never did when he

could possibly help it) to make the desolating announcement that he and

his Eliza were thinking of blackening the Largelady scutcheon by

opening a shop, he found the little household already convulsed by a

prior announcement from Clara that she also was going to work in an old

furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been started by a fellow

Wellsian. This appointment Clara owed, after all, to her old social

accomplishment of Push. She had made up her mind that, cost what it

might, she would see Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had achieved her

end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise

deserved. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered

him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His

pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his

teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine

apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair

to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible. Clara talked of nothing else

for weeks and weeks afterwards. And as she happened to talk to the lady

of the furniture shop, and that lady also desired above all things to

know Mr. Wells and sell pretty things to him, she offered Clara a job

on the chance of achieving that end through her.

And so it came about that Eliza's luck held, and the expected

opposition to the flower shop melted away. The shop is in the arcade of

a railway station not very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and

if you live in that neighborhood you may go there any day and buy a

buttonhole from Eliza.

Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would you not like to be

assured that the shop was an immense success, thanks to Eliza's charms

and her early business experience in Covent Garden? Alas! the truth is

the truth: the shop did not pay for a long time, simply because Eliza

and her Freddy did not know how to keep it. True, Eliza had not to

begin at the very beginning: she knew the names and prices of the

cheaper flowers; and her elation was unbounded when she found that

Freddy, like all youths educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly

inefficient schools, knew a little Latin. It was very little, but

enough to make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at

his ease with botanical nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew nothing

else; and Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen shillings

or so, and had acquired a certain familiarity with the language of

Milton from her struggles to qualify herself for winning Higgins's bet,

could not write out a bill without utterly disgracing the

establishment. Freddy's power of stating in Latin that Balbus built a

wall and that Gaul was divided into three parts did not carry with it

the slightest knowledge of accounts or business: Colonel Pickering had

to explain to him what a cheque book and a bank account meant. And the

pair were by no means easily teachable. Freddy backed up Eliza in her

obstinate refusal to believe that they could save money by engaging a

bookkeeper with some knowledge of the business. How, they argued, could

you possibly save money by going to extra expense when you already

could not make both ends meet? But the Colonel, after making the ends

meet over and over again, at last gently insisted; and Eliza, humbled

to the dust by having to beg from him so often, and stung by the

uproarious derision of Higgins, to whom the notion of Freddy succeeding

at anything was a joke that never palled, grasped the fact that

business, like phonetics, has to be learned.