he has spoilt her life. As a flower-girl,
she tells him, she used to earn her living honestly; now there is nothing
she is good for.

Of course, you say, her contact with refined society--"we needs must love
the highest when we see it"--has unfitted her for mixing with inferior
people. On the contrary. She has, it is true, passed the final test of a
series of social functions; but meanwhile all this time of her
apprenticeship in manners she has been living her daily life, doing
half-menial duties, in the house of _Higgins_, who happens to have no
manners at all. One trembles, indeed, to picture the figure that he
himself, the master, must have cut when he took his pupil to the halls of
the great.

[Illustration: We venture to suggest a new attitude to illustrate the ease
of manner which one expects from a Master of Phonetics and Deportment.

_Henry Higgins_ Sir HERBERT TREE.]

Then perhaps, you say, she has fallen into an unrequited passion for him,
and this accounts for her peevishness? Well, if she has, we have only Mr.
SHAW'S word for it, and she gets no sympathy from us for her deplorable
taste in men. There was another man who was always about the house, a man
with a habit of courtesy, but this gallant soldier left her cold. Such is
the perversity of women--and Mr. SHAW. _Higgins's_ one act of civility to
his _protegee_, on which we had to base our hopes of a happy issue, was to
throw a bunch of flowers at her from a balcony in Chelsea--not perhaps a
very tactful reminder of her origin. But he was only just in time. Another
two seconds of delay and the final curtain would have cut off this tardy
and inadequate effort of conciliation.

[Illustration: FROM FLOWER-GIRL TO PERFECT LADY.

(_Showing middle stage in course of lessons in Polite Conversation._)

_Eliza Doolittle_ (Mrs. PATRICK CAMPBELL) to _Mrs. Eynsford-Hill_ (Miss
CARLOTTA ADDISON). "An aunt of mine died of in-flu-en-za: but it's my
be-lief they done h-her in."]

However, nobody goes to a production of Mr. SHAW'S with the idea of seeing
a play. We go to hear him discourse on just anything that occurs to him
without prejudice in the matter of his mouthpiece. This time he was
represented by a dustman; and for once Mr. SHAW consented to temper his
wisdom to the limitations of its repository. His _Alfred Doolittle_ (father
of the flower-girl) threw off a little cheap satire on the morality of the
middle-classes, yet admitted the drawbacks of unauthor