"When the gods of Hellas were discrowned, there was a famous scurrying from Olympos to the world of mortals, where each deity must henceforward make shift.. Eros went to the Grammarians. He would be a schoolmaster...
teaching dunderheaded mortals the First Conjugation.
...and ever since this period has the verb 'to love' been the first to be mastered in all well-constituted grammars, as it is in life.

"Heigho! it is not an easy verb to conjugate. One gets into trouble enough, in floundering through its manifold nuances, which range inevitably through the bold-faced 'I love', the confident 'I will love', the hopeful 'I may be loved', and so on to the wistful, pitiful Pluperfect Subjunctive Passive, 'I might have been loved if'...

This is probably the weakest Cabell i've read so far although i was still sorely tempted at times to give it 4 stars.
It follows a young man/writer and his various love affairs. It smacks a bit too much of biography in places, its sporadic and each love is like a short story by itself. However there is a lot of variety in the female characters with one even being an author writing under the penname George, not sure if that was a reference to George Elliot.

I think i missed about 15% of the text as the conversations were sometimes hard to follow and between the style, slang and era specific references it can be hard to parse.
HOWEVER, there is also a lot of sections i liked and the usual high amount of quotable lines. Not recommended as a starting point for cabell but still entertaining.

Note: There were a number of references to Setebos and i finally rembered thats a name i actually know. Setebos is the god Caliban created for himself in the Tempest, yay me, i'm erudite ;) . ( )

This is probably the one book by Cabell the critics like least . . . or is that "detest the most"? It is the tale of an on-the-make lover, Robert Townshend, and his trail of courting young women, one by one. The book is written in the first person. It relates a series of liaisons not so much dangerous as callous and calculating. And yet, in the back of the narrator's mind, this indication that he's missing something.

The comedy reaches its highest point in a clash of mutual betrayal by two lovers who engage in love only to make literature of it. This is one of the funnier moments in Cabell's oeuvre, though, perhaps, it does not redeem a novel from what, in its day, was its obvious immorality. Today, of course, most readers would be bored, and see not so much immorality as too much talk.

Times have changed. I'm afraid I still like the book, though. ( )