LIZA. Oh, you ARE a devil. You can twist the heart in a girl as easy as
some could twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs. Pearce warned me. Time and
again she has wanted to leave you; and you always got round her at the
last minute. And you don't care a bit for her. And you don't care a bit
for me.
HIGGINS. I care for life, for humanity; and you are a part of it that
has come my way and been built into my house. What more can you or
anyone ask?
LIZA. I won't care for anybody that doesn't care for me.
HIGGINS. Commercial principles, Eliza. Like [reproducing her Covent
Garden pronunciation with professional exactness] s'yollin voylets
[selling violets], isn't it?
LIZA. Don't sneer at me. It's mean to sneer at me.
HIGGINS. I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn't become
either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my righteous
contempt for Commercialism. I don't and won't trade in affection. You
call me a brute because you couldn't buy a claim on me by fetching my
slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman
fetching a man's slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch YOUR
slippers? I think a good deal more of you for throwing them in my face.
No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who
cares for a slave? If you come back, come back for the sake of good
fellowship; for you'll get nothing else. You've had a thousand times as
much out of me as I have out of you; and if you dare to set up your
little dog's tricks of fetching and carrying slippers against my
creation of a Duchess Eliza, I'll slam the door in your silly face.
LIZA. What did you do it for if you didn't care for me?
HIGGINS [heartily] Why, because it was my job.
LIZA. You never thought of the trouble it would make for me.
HIGGINS. Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been
afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. There's
only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things. Cowards,
you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.
LIZA. I'm no preacher: I don't notice things like that. I notice that
you don't notice me.
HIGGINS [jumping up and walking about intolerantly] Eliza: you're an
idiot. I waste the treasures of my Miltonic mind by spreading them
before you. Once for all, understand that I go my way and do my work
without caring twopence what happens to either of us. I am not
intimidated, like your father and your stepmother. So you can come back
or go to the devil: which you please.