Kennaston did not concern himself with fiction for its own sake, but because it opened to him the gates of the Unknown. It was his road to spiritual adventure. He is an authentic daydreamer. He is not unhappy. He has every reason for being satisfied with life as it is. He is rich, talented, successful as an author, married to an attractive woman; yet he is bored. Bovaryism in his case is all the more striking because it is gratuitous. Life weighs on his shoulders; like all of Cabell’s heroes, he needs adventure, a written if not a real one. We find the novelist and the adventurer united in his person. Kennaston represents two things: first, the common run of man dissatisfied with reality and instinctively seeking an escape through dreams, and then, the taking to fiction, writing for more complete evasion. But let us listen to Kennaston’s complaint against reality and his plea in favor of dreams. It is he speaking through the mouth of the scribe Horvendile, his double; we are reminded of the familiar grievances of Carol Kennicott, Babbitt and the characters in Dreiser, Anderson and Sinclair Lewis: I find my country an inadequate place in which to live.... Oh, many persons live there happily enough! or, at worst, they seem to find the prizes and the applause of my country worth striving for wholeheartedly. But there is that in some of us which gets no exercise there; and we struggle blindly, with impotent yearning, to gain outlet for great powers which we know that we possess, even though we do not know their names. And so, we dreamers wander at adventure to Storisende--oh, and into more perilous realms sometimes!--in search of a life that will find employment for every faculty we have. For life in my country does not engross us utterly. We dreamers waste there at loose ends, waste futilely.... Oh, yes! it may be that we are not sane; could we be sure of that, it would be a comfort. But, as it is, we dreamers only know that life in my country does not content us, and never can content us. So we struggle, for a tiny dear-bought while, into other and fairer-seeming lands in search of--we know not what! And after a little, we must go back into my country and live there as best we may. This is, in a nutshell, the plight of all the inhibited and repressed people with whom we have met in the American _gesta_ told by the American novelists of to-day.