Echoes of the War

by J. M. Barrie

'You needn't mention it to mother.'

'I won't.' Mr. Torrance is elated to share a secret with Roger about which mother is not to know. 'Think your mother and I are an aged pair, Roger?'

'I never—of course you are not young.'

'How long have you known that? I mean, it's true—but I didn't know it till quite lately.'

'That you're old?'

'Hang it, Roger, not so bad as that—elderly. This will stagger you; but I assure you that until the other day I jogged along thinking of myself as on the whole still one of the juveniles.' He makes a wry face. 'I crossed the bridge, Roger, without knowing it.'

'What made you know?'

'What makes us know all the new things, Roger?—the war. I'll tell you a secret. When we realised in August of 1914 that myriads of us were to be needed, my first thought wasn't that I had a son, but that I must get fit myself.'

'You!'

'Funny, isn't it?' says Mr. Torrance quite nastily. 'But, as I tell you, I didn't know I had ceased to be young, I went into Regent's Park and tried to run a mile.'