Eliza comes into Mr. Henry Higgins's laboratory looking like a poor young flower-selling woman that she is. She tries to look nice by wearing a hat decorated with ostrich feathers in the colors red, sky-blue, and orange. Her apron is not quite clean, and she has on a shabby coat that "has been tidied a little." She is putting her best foot forward but nevertheless is unmistakably a lower class person out of place in a well-to-do home. As Higgins says of her:

She's so deliciously low—so horribly dirty—

Higgins sends her off immediately to be bathed, and we learn she has never had a full bath in her life. Eliza's appearance shows how wide the class divide was in the England of a hundred years ago. Today, a poor working person like Eliza would probably be able to wear clean clothes and bathe. Eliza's circumstances force her to be dirty and shabby.