And so it came about that Eliza’s luck held, and the expected opposition to the flower shop melted away.  The shop is in the arcade of a railway station not very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and if you live in that neighborhood you may go there any day and buy a buttonhole from Eliza.

Now here is a last opportunity for romance.  Would you not like to be assured that the shop was an immense success, thanks to Eliza’s charms and her early business experience in Covent Garden?  Alas! the truth is the truth:  the shop did not pay for a long time, simply because Eliza and her Freddy did not know how to keep it.  True, Eliza had not to begin at the very beginning:  she knew the names and prices of the cheaper flowers; and her elation was unbounded when she found that Freddy, like all youths educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly inefficient schools, knew a little Latin.  It was very little, but enough to make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at his ease with botanical nomenclature.  Unfortunately he knew nothing else; and Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen shillings or so, and had acquired a certain familiarity with the language of Milton from her struggles to qualify herself for winning Higgins’s bet, could not write out a bill without utterly disgracing the establishment.  Freddy’s power of stating in Latin that Balbus built a wall and that Gaul was divided into three parts did not carry with it the slightest knowledge of accounts or business:  Colonel Pickering had to explain to him what a cheque book and a bank account meant.  And the pair were by no means easily teachable.  Freddy backed up Eliza in her obstinate refusal to believe that they could save money by engaging a bookkeeper with some knowledge of the business.  How, they argued, could you possibly save money by going to extra expense when you already could not make both ends meet?  But the Colonel, after making the ends meet over and over again, at last gently insisted; and Eliza, humbled to the dust by having to beg from him so often, and stung by the uproarious derision of Higgins, to whom the notion of Freddy succeeding at anything was a joke that never palled, grasped the fact that business, like phonetics, has to be learned.

On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell.  There were even classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the flower business.  He, being a humorist, explained to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined the information.  He suggested that they should combine the London School