Pygmalion

by George Bernard Shaw

What is life but a series of inspired follies?

HIGGINS. You know, Pickering, that woman has the most extraordinary ideas about me. Here I am, a shy, diffident sort of man. I’ve never been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like other chaps. And yet she’s firmly persuaded that I’m an arbitrary overbearing bossing kind of person. I can’t account for it.

PICKERING. Have you no morals, man? DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Can’t afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

LIZA. I’m a good girl, I am; and I won’t pick up no free and easy ways. HIGGINS. Eliza: if you say again that you’re a good girl, your father shall take you home.

MRS. HIGGINS. Go home at once. HIGGINS [kissing her] I know, mother. I came on purpose. MRS. HIGGINS. But you mustn’t. I’m serious, Henry. You offend all my friends: they stop coming whenever they meet you.

MRS. HIGGINS [at last, conversationally] Will it rain, do you think? LIZA. The shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely to move slowly in an easterly direction. There are no indications of any great change in the barometrical situation.

HIGGINS. I’ll solve that problem. I’ve half solved it already. MRS. HIGGINS. No, you two infinitely stupid male creatures:

MRS. HIGGINS [rises with an impatient bounce, and returns to her work at the writing-table. She sweeps a litter of disarranged papers out of her way; snatches a sheet of paper from her stationery case; and tries resolutely to write. At the third line she gives it up; flings down her pen; grips the table angrily and exclaims] Oh, men! men!! men!!!

relatable

LIZA [snatching up the slippers, and hurling them at him one after the other with all her force] There are your slippers. And there. Take your slippers; and may you never have a day’s luck with them!

You go girl

LIZA. Oh, you ARE a devil. You can twist the heart in a girl as easy as some could twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs. Pearce warned me. Time and again she has wanted to leave you; and you always got round her at the last minute. And you don’t care a bit for her. And you don’t care a bit for me.

LIZA. Freddy’s not a fool. And if he’s weak and poor and wants me, may be he’d make me happier than my betters that bully me and don’t want me.

I won’t be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I can’t have kindness, I’ll have independence.

PERIOD

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.

But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things.