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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Act I - 08 Act II - 42 Act III - 118 Act IV - 167 Act V - 191 broke the matter to Higgins that evening. The sole comment vouchsafed by him very nearly led to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the effect that she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy. Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said he had been think- ing of a shop himself; though it had presented itself to his pennilessness as a small place in which Eliza should sell tobacco at one counter whilst he sold news- papers at the opposite one. But he agreed that it would be extraordinarily jolly to go early every morning with Eliza to Covent Garden and buy flowers on the scene of their first meeting: a sentiment which earned him many kisses from his wife. He added that he had always been afraid to propose anything of the sort, be- cause Clara would make an awful row about a step that must damage her matri- monial chances, and his mother could not be expected to like it after clinging for so many years to that step of the social ladder on which retail trade is impossible. This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected by Freddy’s mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions into those artistic circles which were the highest within her reach, discovered that her conversational qualifica- tions were expected to include a grounding in the novels of Mr H. G. Wells. She borrowed them in various directions so energetically that she swallowed them all within two months. The result was a conversion of a kind quite common today. A modern Acts of the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles if anyone were capable of writing it. Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as a disagreeable and ri- diculous person, and to her own mother as in some inexplicable way a social fail- Act I - 08 Act II - 42 Act III - 118 Act IV - 167 Act V - 191 |
