A one-armed man in a khaki cap and hospital blue came and stood by his side and looked in a pleased yet puzzled way at the exquisite poem in marble. At last he spoke—in a rich Irish accent.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but could you be telling me the meaning of it, at all?”
Doggie awoke and smiled.
“I do,” said the soldier.
“It is about Peter Pan. A kind of Fairy Tale. You can see the ‘little people’ peeping out—I think you call them so in Ireland.”
“We do that,” said the soldier.
So Doggie sketched the outline of the immortal story of the Boy Who Will Never Grow Old, and the Irishman listened with deep interest.
“Indeed,” said he after a time, “it is good to come back to the true things after the things out there.” He waved his one arm in the vague direction of the war.
“Why do you call them true things?” Doggie asked quickly.