The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed,  would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so  enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and  reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of  "happy endings" to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza  Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration  it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such  transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely  ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by  playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she  began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions  have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the  heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it.  This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted  on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because  the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature  in general, and of feminine instinct in particular.

Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked  her, was not coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered  decision. When a bachelor interests, and dominates, and teaches,  and becomes important to a spinster, as Higgins with Eliza, she  always, if she has character enough to be capable of it,  considers very seriously indeed whether she will play for  becoming that bachelor's wife, especially if he is so little  interested in marriage that a determined and devoted woman might  capture him if she set herself resolutely to do it. Her decision  will depend a good deal on whether she is really free to choose;  and that, again, will depend on her age and income. If she is at  the end of her youth, and has no security for her livelihood, she  will marry him because she must marry anybody who will provide  for her. But at Eliza's age a good-looking girl does not feel  that pressure; she feels free to pick and choose. She is  therefore guided by her instinct in the matter. Eliza's instinct  tells her not to marry Higgins. It does not tell her to give him  up. It is not in the slightest doubt as to his remaining one of  the strongest personal interests in her life. It would be very  sorely strained if there was another woman likely to supplant her  with him. But as she feels sure of him on that last point, she  has no doubt at all as to her course, and would not have any,  even if the difference of twenty years in age, which seems so  great to youth, did not exist between them.

As our own instincts are not appealed to by her conclusion, let  us see whether we cannot discover some reason in it. When Higgins  excused his indifference to young women on the ground that they  had an irresistible rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his  inveterate old-bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the  extent that remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative  boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal  grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated  sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house  beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few  women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of  his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his  specifically sexual impulses. This makes him a standing puzzle to  the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up  in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents, and to  whom, consequently, literature, painting, sculpture, music, and  affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come  at all. The word passion means nothing else to them; and that  Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize his  mother instead of Eliza, would seem to them absurd and unnatural.  Nevertheless, when we look round and see that hardly anyone is  too ugly or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she  wants one, whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the  average in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that  the disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is  so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius  achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced or  aided by parental fascination.

Now, though Eliza was incapable of thus explaining to herself  Higgins's formidable powers of resistance to the charm that  prostrated Freddy at the first glance, she was instinctively  aware that she could never obtain a complete grip of him, or come  between him and his mother (the first necessity of the married  woman). To put it shortly, she knew that for some mysterious  reason he had not the makings of a married man in him, according  to her conception of a husband as one to whom she would be his nearest and fondest and warmest interest. Even had there been no  mother-rival, she would still have refused to accept an interest  in herself that was secondary to philosophic interests. Had Mrs.  Higgins died, there would still have been Milton and the  Universal Alphabet. Landor's remark that to those who have the  greatest power of loving, love is a secondary affair, would not  have recommended Landor to Eliza. Put that along with her  resentment of Higgins's domineering superiority, and her mistrust  of his coaxing cleverness in getting round her and evading her  wrath when he had gone too far with his impetuous bullying, and  you will see that Eliza's instinct had good grounds for warning  her not to marry her Pygmalion.

And now, whom did Eliza marry? For if Higgins was a predestinate  old bachelor, she was most certainly not a predestinate old maid.  Well, that can be told very shortly to those who have not guessed  it from the indications she has herself given them.

Almost immediately after Eliza is stung into proclaiming her  considered determination not to marry Higgins, she mentions the  fact that young Mr. Frederick Eynsford Hill is pouring out his  love for her daily through the post. Now Freddy is young,  practically twenty years younger than Higgins: he is a gentleman  (or, as Eliza would qualify him, a toff), and speaks like one; he  is nicely dressed, is treated by the Colonel as an equal, loves  her unaffectedly, and is not her master, nor ever likely to  dominate her in spite of his advantage of social standing. Eliza  has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love  to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten. "When you go  to women," says Nietzsche, "take your whip with you." Sensible  despots have never confined that precaution to women: they have  taken their whips with them when they have dealt with men, and  been slavishly idealized by the men over whom they have  flourished the whip much more than by women. No doubt there are  slavish women as well as slavish men; and women, like men, admire  those that are stronger than themselves. But to admire a strong  person and to live under that strong person's thumb are two  different things. The weak may not be admired and  hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned;  and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying  people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies;  but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of  situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with  which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger  partner to help them out. Accordingly, it is a truth everywhere  in evidence that strong people, masculine or feminine, not only  do not marry stronger people, but do not show any preference for  them in selecting their friends. When a lion meets another with a  louder roar "the first lion thinks the last a bore." The man or  woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other  quality in a partner than strength.

The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry strong  people who do not frighten them too much; and this often leads  them to make the mistake we describe metaphorically as "biting  off more than they can chew." They want too much for too little;  and when the bargain is unreasonable beyond all bearing, the  union becomes impossible: it ends in the weaker party being  either discarded or borne as a cross, which is worse. People who  are not only weak, but silly or obtuse as well, are often in  these difficulties.

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.

Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected. When she  consulted them, Higgins declined to be bothered about her housing  problem when that solution was so simple. Eliza's desire to have  Freddy in the house with her seemed of no more importance than if  she had wanted an extra piece of bedroom furniture. Pleas as to  Freddy's character, and the moral obligation on him to earn his  own living, were lost on Higgins. He denied that Freddy had any  character, and declared that if he tried to do any useful work  some competent person would have the trouble of undoing it: a  procedure involving a net loss to the community, and great  unhappiness to Freddy himself, who was obviously intended by  Nature for such light work as amusing Eliza, which, Higgins  declared, was a much more useful and honorable occupation than  working in the city. When Eliza referred again to her project of  teaching phonetics, Higgins abated not a jot of his violent  opposition to it. He said she was not within ten years of being  qualified to meddle with his pet subject; and as it was evident  that the Colonel agreed with him, she felt she could not go  against them in this grave matter, and that she had no right,  without Higgins's consent, to exploit the knowledge he had given  her; for his knowledge seemed to her as much his private property  as his watch: Eliza was no communist. Besides, she was  superstitiously devoted to them both, more entirely and frankly  after her marriage than before it.

It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which had cost  him much perplexed cogitation. He one day asked Eliza, rather  shyly, whether she had quite given up her notion of keeping a  flower shop. She replied that she had thought of it, but had put  it out of her head, because the Colonel had said, that day at  Mrs. Higgins's, that it would never do. The Colonel confessed  that when he said that, he had not quite recovered from the  dazzling impression of the day before. They broke the matter to  Higgins that evening. The sole comment vouchsafed by him very  nearly led to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the effect  that she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy.

Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said he had  been thinking of a shop himself; though it had presented itself  to his pennilessness as a small place in which Eliza should sell  tobacco at one counter whilst he sold newspapers at the opposite  one. But he agreed that it would be extraordinarily jolly to go  early every morning with Eliza to Covent Garden and buy flowers  on the scene of their first meeting: a sentiment which earned him  many kisses from his wife. He added that he had always been  afraid to propose anything of the sort, because Clara would make  an awful row about a step that must damage her matrimonial  chances, and his mother could not be expected to like it after  clinging for so many years to that step of the social ladder on  which retail trade is impossible.

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.

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.

On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in  shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping  and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female,  from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even  classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal  appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course  bearing on the flower business. He, being a humorist, explained  to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese  Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an  article on Metaphysics and combined the information. He suggested  that they should combine the London School with Kew Gardens.  Eliza, to whom the procedure of the Dickensian gentleman seemed  perfectly correct (as in fact it was) and not in the least funny  (which was only her ignorance) took his advice with entire  gravity. But the effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was  a request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton's  verse, was calligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful  Italian hand, that he would teach her to write. He declared that  she was congenitally incapable of forming a single letter worthy  of the least of Milton's words; but she persisted; and again he  suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her with a  combination of stormy intensity, concentrated patience, and  occasional bursts of interesting disquisition on the beauty and  nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting.  Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which  was a positive extension of her personal beauty, and spending  three times as much on stationery as anyone else because certain  qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to her. She  could not even address an envelope in the usual way because it  made the margins all wrong.

Their commercial school days were a period of disgrace and  despair for the young couple. They seemed to be learning nothing  about flower shops. At last they gave it up as hopeless, and  shook the dust of the shorthand schools, and the polytechnics,  and the London School of Economics from their feet for ever.  Besides, the business was in some mysterious way beginning to  take care of itself. They had somehow forgotten their objections  to employing other people. They came to the conclusion that their  own way was the best, and that they had really a remarkable  talent for business. The Colonel, who had been compelled for some  years to keep a sufficient sum on current account at his bankers  to make up their deficits, found that the provision was  unnecessary: the young people were prospering. It is true that  there was not quite fair play between them and their competitors  in trade. Their week-ends in the country cost them nothing, and  saved them the price of their Sunday dinners; for the motor car  was the Colonel's; and he and Higgins paid the hotel bills. Mr.  F. Hill, florist and greengrocer (they soon discovered that there  was money in asparagus; and asparagus led to other vegetables),  had an air which stamped the business as classy; and in private  life he was still Frederick Eynsford Hill, Esquire. Not that  there was any swank about him: nobody but Eliza knew that he had  been christened Frederick Challoner. Eliza herself swanked like  anything.

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.