ant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his
teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine
apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair
to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible. Clara talked of nothing else
for weeks and weeks afterwards. And as she happened to talk to the lady
of the furniture shop, and that lady also desired above all things to
know Mr. Wells and sell pretty things to him, she offered Clara a job
on the chance of achieving that end through her.

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 Colo