“Peg For Short”

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Featuring Elsa Ryan and William Roselle. Written by Dion Titheradge. The scene is the bachelor quarters of a “crab.” The program calls him “The Man” (Mr. Roselle) and it also lists Miss Ryan as “The Girl.” The “crab” hasn’t had a female in his rooms for 12 years when one evening he notices a girl stretched across his doorstep in a faint, as he supposes. He carries her in and places her on the sofa. She awakens and he tells her what a rum sort of a guy he is and how he does hate the women. She answers in an Irish brogue that if he had more women around the house his threshold would be worn out. Miss Ryan is quite versatile with her brogue. She discards and regains it at will, making it thick or soft as the occasion demands. The man tells her he married 12 years before an Irish girl while he was in a Mexican prison condemned to be shot the next morning. He did it he said that some one at least might have his estate. He escaped to find the girl had gotten the estate but forgotten him. That’s why he hates the women, Irish girls especially. Then The Girl said it was she he worried and then he said the story wasn’t so and then she laughed, saying she had performed the fainting trick as a ruse to obtain admission into his rooms for an interview.

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