Liza. Don’t you believe the old liar.
He’d as soon you set a bull-dog on him as a
clergyman. You won’t see him again in a
hurry.
Higgins. I don’t want to, Eliza.
Do you?
Liza. Not me. I don’t want never
to see him again, I don’t. He’s a
disgrace to me, he is, collecting dust, instead of
working at his trade.
Pickering. What is his trade, Eliza?
Liza. Talking money out of other people’s
pockets into his own. His proper trade’s
a navvy; and he works at it sometimes too—for
exercise—and earns good money at it.
Ain’t you going to call me Miss Doolittle any
more?
Pickering. I beg your pardon, Miss Doolittle.
It was a slip of the tongue.
Liza. Oh, I don’t mind; only it sounded
so genteel. I should just like to take a taxi
to the corner of Tottenham Court Road and get out
there and tell it to wait for me, just to put the girls
in their place a bit. I wouldn’t speak
to them, you know.
Pickering. Better wait til we get you something
really fashionable.
Higgins. Besides, you shouldn’t cut
your old friends now that you have risen in the world.
That’s what we call snobbery.
Liza. You don’t call the like of them
my friends now, I should hope. They’ve
took it out of me often enough with their ridicule
when they had the chance; and now I mean to get a bit
of my own back. But if I’m to have fashionable
clothes, I’ll wait. I should like to have
some. Mrs. Pearce says you’re going to give
me some to wear in bed at night different to what
I wear in the daytime; but it do seem a waste of money
when you could get something to show. Besides,
I never could fancy changing into cold things on a
winter night.
Mrs. Pearce [coming back] Now, Eliza.
The new things have come for you to try on.
Liza. Ah—ow—oo—ooh!
[She rushes out].
Mrs. Pearce [following her] Oh, don’t
rush about like that, girl [She shuts the door behind
her].
Higgins. Pickering: we have taken on
a stiff job.
Pickering [with conviction] Higgins: we
have.
It is Mrs. Higgins’s at-home day. Nobody
has yet arrived. Her drawing-room, in a flat
on Chelsea embankment, has three windows looking on
the river; and the ceiling is not so lofty as it would
be in an older house of the same pretension. The
windows are open, giving access to a balcony with
flowers in pots. If you stand with your face
to the windows, you have the fireplace on your left
and the door in the right-hand wall close to the corner
nearest the windows.
