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 mi