The Cream of the Jest : A Comedy of Evasions is a comical and philosophical novel with possible fantasy elements, by James Branch Cabell, published in 1917.

Also, part of The Cream of the Jest consists of the ending of the first version of Kennaston's novel, which is set in the Middle Ages around the castle of Storisende in a mythical country.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In other books Cabell connects the name both to Hamlet's father in the Gesta Danorum and to the character in the Prose Edda whose big toe froze off and was made into a star.

[11] The narrator mentions a number of Protestant theologians whose ideas Kennaston sees as akin to the Christianity he arrives at, with its "Artist-God" Whose greatest character was Himself as Christ.

Kennaston's novel is reminiscent of Cabell's 1913 novel The Soul of Melicent, later republished under the writer's original title Domnei, which is part of his series Biography of the Life of Manuel.

[15] Both Theodore Roosevelt and another minor character warn Kennaston cryptically about the sigil in his novel, in which connection they mention white pigeons and a small mirror.