Pygmalion

That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is astonishing how much

Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimpole Street in

spite of the shop and her own family. And it is notable that though she

never nags her husband, and frankly loves the Colonel as if she were

his favorite daughter, she has never got out of the habit of nagging

Higgins that was established on the fatal night when she won his bet

for him. She snaps his head off on the faintest provocation, or on

none. He no longer dares to tease her by assuming an abysmal

inferiority of Freddy's mind to his own. He storms and bullies and

derides; but she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to

ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins; and it is the only

request of his that brings a mulish expression into her face. Nothing

but some emergency or calamity great enough to break down all likes and

dislikes, and throw them both back on their common humanity--and may

they be spared any such trial!--will ever alter this. She knows that

Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not need her. The

very scrupulousness with which he told her that day that he had become

used to having her there, and dependent on her for all sorts of little

services, and that he should miss her if she went away (it would never

have occurred to Freddy or the Colonel to say anything of the sort)

deepens her inner certainty that she is "no more to him than them

slippers", yet she has a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper

than the infatuation of commoner souls. She is immensely interested in

him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she

could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with

nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his

pedestal and see him making love like any common man. We all have

private imaginations of that sort. But when it comes to business, to

the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams

and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does

not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never does quite like

Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether

agreeable.