Pygmalion: Flower girl Eliza Doolittle toils for bread and butter. One day she met a professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins. Higgins and his friend Colonel Pickering made a bet that he could train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, was impeccable speech. Higgins did not expect to fall in love with Eliza, but at last he threw off his airs and got together with Eliza.