“The Cream of the Jest” is another treatise on day-dreaming and absent-mindedness. One day, alas! Kennaston’s wife threw in the wastebasket the magic disc which was his key to wonderland. That was the death blow to his flights into romance and the end of his romantic career. His wife, too, died in a mysterious manner, probably punished by the fairies for being too prosaic. We learn at the end of the book as a sort of consolation over the loss of the talisman and an assurance as to its origin--a signal revenge of reality upon dreams--that the sigil of Scoteia was but the cover of a pot of cold cream! Cabell buries Kennaston without much ceremony after calling him down for his evasions. Yet the parting word is still in favor of dreams. From the scientific point of view Kennaston is not hard to explain. His was a case of auto-suggestion, but this explanation does not suffice for the novelist. The case of Felix Kennaston was not an isolated one. Felix was a representative man. He impersonated the conflict between fiction and romance: To Kennaston the dream alone could matter--his proud assurance that life was not a blind and aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that he, this gross, weak animal, could be strong and excellent and wise, and his existence a pageant of beauty and nobility. To prove this dream was based on a delusion would be no doubt an enjoyable retaliation for Kennaston’s being so unengaging to the eye and so stupid to talk to; but it would make the dream no whit less lovely or less dear to him--or to the rest of us either. For it occurred to me that his history was, in essentials, the history of our race, thus far. All I advanced for or against him, equally, was true of all men that ever lived.... For it is in this inadequate flesh that each of us must serve his dream; and so, must fail in the dream’s service, and must parody that which he holds dearest. To this we seem condemned, being what we are. Thus, one and all, we play false to the dream, and it evades us, and we dwindle into responsible citizens. And yet always thereafter--because of many abiding memories--we know, assuredly, that the way of flesh is not a futile scurrying through dining rooms and offices and shops and parlors, and thronged streets and restaurants, “and so to bed” ... It was in appropriate silence, therefore, that I regarded Felix Kennaston as a parable. The man was not merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.