In act 4 of George Bernard Shaw's classic play Pygmalion, written in 1912 and first performed on the London stage in 1913, professor of phonetics Henry Higgins and his friend Colonel Pickering are congratulating Higgins on how well he trained flower girl Eliza Doolittle to "pass her off" as a proper lady at a London society ball.

Neither Higgins nor Pickering acknowledges Eliza's role in the whole endeavor, which prompts Eliza to throw Higgins's slippers at him and return a ring that he gave her, which he promptly throws in the fireplace. Higgins tells Eliza that she's ungrateful for all the attention and training he's given her and calls her a "heartless guttersnipe."

In act 5, the audience learns that Higgins and Pickering awoke to find Eliza gone from Higgins's home, and Higgins and Pickering are at the home of Higgins's mother making a phone call to the police to try to locate Eliza. The audience then learns from Mrs. Higgins that Eliza is actually upstairs in Mrs. Higgins's home.

Higgins tells his mother that "Eliza's bolted," and Mrs. Higgins takes Higgins to task for calling the police. "What right have you to go to the police and give the girl's name as if she were a thief, or a lost umbrella, or something?"

Their discussion about Eliza is interrupted by Eliza's father, Mr. Doolittle. When their discussion resumes, Mrs. Higgins informs Higgins and Pickering that Eliza came to her early that morning, distressed and disappointed at the way that Higgins and Pickering treated her the night before, and that she's been upstairs the whole time.