Eliza and Freddy's Happy Ending- Original Writing

Eliza and Freddy's Happy Ending- Original Writing

One rainy evening in London, two gentlewomen, a mother and daughter,

begin conversing with a poor flower girl while waiting for a taxi

under the shelter of a portico crowded with people. Their conversation

begins when Freddy, the son who is looking for the taxi, carelessly

bumps into the flower girl. She attempts to get the mother to buy the

flowers her son has damaged, and is successful. She then tries to sell

her flowers to another gentleman, when someone in the crowd warns her

that a man is taking notes on what she has been saying. She becomes

hysterical, believing the man wrongly suspects her of prostitution,

but it is discovered that he is merely a phonetician taking down her

accent in phonetic script. He demonstrates that he can tell where any

man in England was born just by hearing his accent. The gentleman the

flower girl originally propositioned introduces himself to the

phonetician as Colonel Pickering, an expert in Indian dialects. The

notetaker reveals himself to be Henry Higgins, author of the Universal

Grammar and professional language tutor. They part together for

dinner, after Higgins throws a generous handful of coins to the

miserable flower girl.

The next morning, Higgins is showing Pickering his laboratory when the

flower girl arrives at his house. She announces that she want to take

English lessons in order to speak well enough to work in a shop. The

two phoneticians are shocked but amused by her proposition, and

Pickering bets Higgins that he cannot transform the flower girl,

Eliza, into a convincing duchess in six months. Higgins decides to

take the bet and persuades the ruffled Eliza to agree to it. While

Mrs. Pearce, Higgins's house servant, takes Eliza to her room and

gives her a bath, Eliza's father, Alfred Doolittle, arrives. Higgins

guesses that Doolittle has come to blackmail him in some way, and

tells Doolittle to take his daughter back. Doolittle does not want his

daughter back; he just wants a little money.