It was
this reply of mine that attracted Howard King's attention. He had been
sitting in one corner of the room quite as disconsolate as I was. But
now he walked over and shook hands and told me that in his opinion
"Robert Elsmere" was not so good a book as "Trilby," which he was just
reading.
Howard King and I belong to the comparatively small class of men whom
nature, or fate, or whatever you please, has decreed to be always a
certain interval behind the times; it might be years or months or days,
according to the rate of speed at which a particular fashion happened to
be moving forward. King told me, for instance, that of late he has been
possessed with a passionate desire to learn the game of ping-pong. When
all the world was playing table-tennis eight or ten years ago, King
viewed the game with disgust. He thought it utterly childish,
uninteresting, and admirably illustrative of all the idiotic qualities
that go to make up a fad. But for the last six months, King said, he
frequently wakes at night and sits up in bed and yearns with all his
soul for a ping-pong set.
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