That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is astonishing how much
Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimpole Street in
spite of the shop and her own family. And it is notable that though she
never nags her husband, and frankly loves the Colonel as if she were
his favorite daughter, she has never got out of the habit of nagging
Higgins that was established on the fatal night when she won his bet
for him. She snaps his head off on the faintest provocation, or on
none. He no longer dares to tease her by assuming an abysmal
inferiority of Freddy's mind to his own. He storms and bullies and
derides; but she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to
ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins; and it is the only
request of his that brings a mulish expression into her face. Nothing
but some emergency or calamity great enough to break down all likes and
dislikes, and throw them both back on their common humanity--and may
they be spared any such trial!--will ever alter this. She knows that
Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not need her. The
very scrupulousness with which he told her that day that he had become
used to having her there, and dependent on her for all sorts of little
services, and that he should miss her if she went away (it would never
have occurred to Freddy or the Colonel to say anything of the sort)
deepens her inner certainty that she is "no more to him than them
slippers", yet she has a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper
than the infatuation of commoner souls. She is immensely interested in
him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she
could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with
nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his
pedestal and see him making love like any common man. We all have
private imaginations of that sort. But when it comes to business, to
the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams
and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does
not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never does quite like
Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether
agreeable.