Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/61

 come so near to capturing Margaret Hugonin and her big fortune, the heiress had paid for the printing of The King's Quest and its companion enterprises in rhyme, as well as the prose Defence of Ignorance—wide-margined specimens of the far-fetched decadence then in vogue, and the idol of Kennaston's youth, when he had seriously essayed the parlor-tricks of "stylists."

And it was once a familiar story how Marian Winwood got revenge on Felix Kennaston, when he married Kathleen Saumarez, by publishing, in a transparent guise of fiction, all the love-letters he had written Miss Winwood; so that Kennaston might also have claimed to be generally recognized as the actual author of her Epistles of Ananias, which years ago created some literary stir.

But this book was to be different from any of his previous compositions. To paraphrase Felix Kennaston's own words (as recorded in the "Colophon" to Men Who Loved Alison), he had determined in this story lovingly to deal with an epoch and a society, and even a geography, whose comeliness had escaped the wear-and-tear of ever