Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected.  When she consulted them, Higgins declined to be bothered about her housing problem when that solution was so simple.  Eliza’s desire to have Freddy in the house with her seemed of no more importance than if she had wanted an extra piece of bedroom furniture.  Pleas as to Freddy’s character, and the moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were lost on Higgins.  He denied that Freddy had any character, and declared that if he tried to do any useful work some competent person would have the trouble of undoing it:  a procedure involving a net loss to the community, and great unhappiness to Freddy himself, who was obviously intended by Nature for such light work as amusing Eliza, which, Higgins declared, was a much more useful and honorable occupation than working in the city.  When Eliza referred again to her project of teaching phonetics, Higgins abated not a jot of his violent opposition to it.  He said she was not within ten years of being qualified to meddle with his pet subject; and as it was evident that the Colonel agreed with him, she felt she could not go against them in this grave matter, and that she had no right, without Higgins’s consent, to exploit the knowledge he had given her; for his knowledge seemed to her as much his private property as his watch:  Eliza was no communist.  Besides, she was superstitiously devoted to them both, more entirely and frankly after her marriage than before it.

It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which had cost him much perplexed cogitation.  He one day asked Eliza, rather shyly, whether she had quite given up her notion of keeping a flower shop.  She replied that she had thought of it, but had put it out of her head, because the Colonel had said, that day at Mrs. Higgins’s, that it would never do.  The Colonel confessed that when he said that, he had not quite recovered from the dazzling impression of the day before.  They 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 thinking 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 newspapers 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, because Clara would make an awful row about a step that must damage her matrimonial 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.