The Cream of the Jest
James Branch Cabell
 The book begins with a chapter in which Richard Harrowby, a Virginian cosmetics manufacturer, promises to explain the sudden appearance of "genius" in his late neighbor, Felix Kennaston. His story will be based on his notes from a conversation with Kennaston. There follow the last six chapters of Kennaston's first draft. A clerk named Horvendile is in love with the heroine, Ettare, but sees her as the ideal woman who is in all desired women, not someone he can love with the disappointments of living with a flesh-and-blood person. He brings about the climactic confrontation between hero and villain. After the hero wins, Horvendile reveals to him and Ettare that they are characters in a book and that he is the Author's stand-in. He must return to his own, prosaic country. As safe-conduct back to Storisende, Ettare gives him half of a talisman she wears, the Sigil of Scoteia. Having composed this while walking in his garden, Kennaston realizes he has dropped a piece of lead: a broken half of a disk inscribed with indecipherable characters. He surmises he was unconsciously inspired by it to invent the sigil. That night he falls asleep looking at the gleaming metal and has a lucid dream of Ettare, who is also aware that she is dreaming. When he touches her, he wakes up. Kennaston writes a new ending for his novel. After a reviewer condemns it as indecent, it becomes a bestseller. When Kennaston sleeps facing light reflected from the mysterious sigil, he dreams that he as Horvendile meets Ettare in various times and places, but she is always untouchable. (He can set up the reflections conveniently because he sleeps in a separate room from his wife; their relations had long been friendly but mutually uncomprehending.) Fascinated by the sigil and mysterious clues he receives, by his dreams, and by the ironic philosophical speculations they lead him to, he loses interest in ordinary life apart from his next book. Just before that book is published, he enters his wife's dressing room in her absence and finds the other half of the sigil. He concludes that she was Ettare all along, and he remembers his former love for her. However, she ignores his tentative affection, and her only comment when he shows her the sigil is that their neighbor Harrowby might know something about it. She throws both pieces away. Without the inspiration of his dreams, Kennaston largely stops writing. His wife dies. As Harrowby is interested in the occult, Kennaston follows his wife's hint by showing him the sigil (found in her dressing room) and telling him about the dreams. Harrowby recognizes it as the mock-antique lid of his company's brand of cold cream. He does not disillusion Kennaston, but "gently" raises the possibility that the sigil might not be miraculous. Kennaston scornfully replies that such a possibility would not change what the sigil taught him: everything in life is miraculous. Cabell himself drew the book's image of the sigil, which looks like writing in a strange alphabet. When turned upside-down and looked at in a mirror, it reads, "James Branch Cabell made this book so that he who wills may read the story of man's eternally unsatisfied hunger in search of beauty. Ettare stays inaccessible always and her loveliness is his to look on only in his dreams".