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from Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion
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Act II |
Pickering: Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?
Higgins: Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?
Pickering: Yes: very frequently.
Higgins: Well, I havent. I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and youre driving at another.
| Topics: Character
Women and Men
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Higgins: You know, Pickering, that woman has the most extraordinary ideas about me. Here I am, a shy, diffident sort of man. Ive never been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like other chaps. And yet shes firmly persuaded that Im an arbitrary overbearing bossing kind of person. I cant account for it.
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Doolittle: [...] I ask you, what am I? Im one of the undeserving poor, thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that hes up agen middle class morality all the time. If theres anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, its always the same story: Youre undeserving; so you cant have it. But my needs is as great as the most deserving widows that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I dont need less than a deserving man: I need more. I dont eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more.
| Topic: Morality
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Pickering: Hell make bad use of it, Im afraid.
Doolittle: Not me, Governor, so help me I wont. Dont you be afraid that Ill save it and spare it and live idle on it. There wont be a penny of it left by Monday: Ill have to go to work same as if Id never had it. It wont pauperize me, you bet. Just one good spree for myself and the missus, giving pleasure to ourselves and employment to others, and satisfaction to you to think its not been throwed away. You couldnt spend it better.
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Doolittle: [...] Ten pounds is a lot of money: it makes a man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what I ask you, Governor: not a penny more, and not a penny less.
| Act III |
Higgins: Do you mean that my language is improper?
Mrs. Higgins: No, dearest: it would be quite propersay on a canal barge; but it would not be proper for her at a garden party.
| Act IV |
Liza: I sold flowers. I didnt sell myself. Now youve made a lady of me Im not fit to sell anything else.
| Act V |
Doolittle: [...] Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free. I touched pretty nigh everybody for money when I wanted it, same as I touched you, Enry Iggins. Now I am worrited; tied neck and heels; and everybody touches me for money.
| Topic: Wealth
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Pickering: Oh, thats only his way, you know. He doesnt mean it.
Liza: Oh, I didnt mean it either, when I was a flower girl. It was only my way. But you see I did it; and thats what makes the difference after all.
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Liza: [...] You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how shes treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.
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Pickering: But youve been through it before, man. You were married to Elizas mother.
Doolittle: Who told you that, Colonel?
Pickering: Well, nobody told me. But I concludednaturally
Doolittle: No: that aint the natural way, Colonel: its only the middle class way. My way was always the undeserving way.
| Topic: Marriage
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Higgins: Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. Theres only one way of escaping trouble; and thats killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.
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Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it.
| Topic: Romance
| text checked (see note) Jan 2005
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Graphics copyright © 2003, 2004 by Hal Keen
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