Pygmalion Act III

It is Mrs. Higgins' at-home day, and she is greatly displeased when Henry Higgins shows up suddenly, for she knows from experience that he is too eccentric to be presentable in front of the sort of respectable company she is expecting. He explains to her that he wants to bring the experiment subject on whom he has been working for some months to her at-home, and explains the bet that he has made with Pickering. …

…play. We see that when he says to this mother, "My idea of a lovable woman is somebody as like you as possible. I shall never get into the way of seriously liking young women: some habits lie too deep to be changed." The irony is that even though he has no doubt that he can transform Eliza, he takes it as a given that there are natural traits in himself that cannot be changed.