nel, 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 polytech