It was a strange period. Later in life May Morris complained that the young socialist men of her youth didn’t *do* anything. I assume that she wanted more than smart conversation…

It is not that she speaks the proper Cockney better than her predecessors, which she does. Or that she is frail and virginal beyond the imaginings of her original creator, which she is. Or that she has developed a comic style half way between a waif and an angel, which she has. It is that she is as sensitive as a nerve-end to the slighted female whom Higgins and Pickering are handling like litmus paper.

This poignancy gives unforeseen depths and pathos to the conflict between her feelings and Higgins’s experiment. And in the homecoming after the Embassy ball, while the doltish bachelors go off into their orgy of self-congratulation (“you did it, you did it”) she stands in a half-shadow against the wall as heartbreaking and tristful as Henryson’s abandoned Cressida: “Then upon him she cast up both her eyen, And with ane blenk it come into his thought, That he sum tyme her face before had seene.”

We went out of the theatre reeling again at the stupidity of what had always seemed to be Ibsen’s fair comment on Shaw: “Shaw? The man who left emotion out of drama.” Ibsen, I guess, never knew Audrey Hepburn.

Burden’s education was limited and she was probably destined to go into domestic service like her mother. After her engagement, she was privately educated to become a rich gentleman’s wife. Her keen intelligence allowed her to recreate herself. She was a voracious reader who became proficient in French and Italian and became an accomplished pianist with a strong background in classical music. Her manners and speech became refined to an extent that contemporaries referred to her as “Queenly”. Later in life, she had no trouble moving in upper class circles.

Audrey Hepburn, she who couldn’t sing the role no matter how hard she tried, was a poor substitute in my mind also.