THE IKON
Ferroll was an intellectual, and he prided himself on the fact. At
Cambridge he had narrowly missed being a Senior Wrangler, and his
principal study there had been Lunar Theory. But when he went down from
Cambridge for good, being a man of some means, he travelled. For a
year he was an honorary Attache at one of the big Embassies. He finally
settled in London with a vague idea of some day writing a _magnum opus_
about the stupidity of mankind; for he had come to the conclusion by the
age of twenty-five that all men were stupid, irreclaimably, irredeemably
stupid; that everything was wrong; that all literature was really bad,
all art much overrated, and all music tedious in the long run.
The years slipped by and he never began his _magnum opus_; he joined
a literary club instead and discussed the current topic of the day.
Sometimes he wrote a short article; never in the daily Press, which he
despised, nor in the reviews (for he never wrote anything as long as a
magazine article), but in a literary weekly he would express in weary
and polished phrases the unemphatic boredom or the mitigated approval
with which the works of his fellow-men inspired him. He was the kind of
man who had nothing in him you could positively dislike, but to whom
you could not talk for five minutes without having a vague sensation of
blight.
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