Poor Little Mockey [Sic] [Poor Little Mookey]

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

There is a good deal of pretty sentiment in this pay and some philosophy. The point of it is that the War has caused some people to feel the realities of life more sincerely than they did before. Christy Marple is a successful young doctor in a sea-side town. His father is a wealthy man, the product of two generations of money-making combined with judicious marriages. Christy, in his turn, is going to make such a marriage; he becomes engaged to Gladys Seraton, the daughter of a prosperous house. Now, old Marple's car skids and kills an old half-Italian street musician, and he receives the old man's daughter, a young girl known as Mookey, into his house with a view to providing for her. Christy becomes attracted to Mookey, but dismisses the idea of falling in love with her, and acquiesces when his father thinks it wise that she should go away. She goes. Then comes the War and Christy joins the R.A.M.C and is going to the front. He realises that he and Gladys have no love for one another and that he loves Mookey, and says that it is duty to marry her before he goes. Gladys agrees with him but old Marple makes a painful scene in which Christy denounces loveless marriages and the sacrifice of the race to family and money. In the last Act old Marple and a fiend persuade Mookey to refuse Christy in his own interest, though she loves him; but she cannot keep it up and Marple is touched, and they are duly married by the Registrar. Christy's outburst (act III, pp.16 seq) is plain spoken though never coarsely so, and might have offered a previous generation: I do not think anyone would be offended now, though of course many would violently disagree with him. The marriage service as used by the Registrar at the end of the play is given in full, but as there is nothing sacred or biblical in it I do not suppose that the objection to the Church service being given can apply to it.