The Door of the Unreal #228286

A man of modesty cannot but feel diffident in making his bow to another public thousands of miles across the sea, cousins and Allies though they be, especially when as well he is breaking entirely new ground in fiction, and essaying a subject of strange interest and peculiar fascination as yet untouched, so far as he is aware, by any other weaver of tales - romantic almost beyond the bounds of human credulity. I need, therefore, hardly say what a pleasure it is to me to cross the Atlantic in print, if not in person.<br><br>My tale, such as it is, boasts no hero in the conventional sense of the term in fiction - possibly not even a protagonist, as the Greeks used to style the principal actor.