Section 13. Thyrsis went away from this interview with some new problems to ponder upon. He had seen a little of this power of the newspapers to defile and torment a man; but he had never dreamed of anything as bad as this. This was murderous, this was monstrous. He saw these papers now as gigantic engines of exploitation and oppression--irresponsible, unscrupulous, wanton--turned loose in society to crush and destroy whom they would. They had taken this man Darrell and they had poured out their poisons upon him; they had tortured him hideously, they had burned him up as with vitriol. As a public force he was no longer a human being at all--he was a deformity, a spectre conjured up to bring fright to the beholder. And through it all he was utterly helpless--as much at their mercy as an infant in the hands of savages. And what had he done? Why had the torture been visited upon him? Thyrsis pictured the men who had led in this soul-hunt. They were supposed to be enlightened Americans at the dawn of the twentieth century; and did they truly hold to the superstition of marriage as a religious sacrament, not to be dissolved by mortal power? Did they really believe that a man who had once been drawn into matrimony was obligated for life--no matter how unhappy he might be, no matter to what indignities he might be subjected? Or, if they did recognize the permissibility of divorce--then why this hue and cry after Darrell, who had borne his punishment for twenty years, and had waited for eight or ten years to test the depths of his new love? The question answered itself; and the answer fanned Thyrsis’ soul into a blaze of indignation. All this patter about the deserted wife, sitting at home with her children and weeping her eyes out--all that was so much hocus-pocus for the ears of the mob. The chiefs of this Inquisition and their torturers and slaves wrote it with their tongues in their cheeks. What they saw was that they had got securely strapped upon their rack the man who had threatened their power, who had laid bare its sources and exposed its iniquity. And they meant that if ever he came out of their torture-chamber, it should be so mangled and crippled that never again would he lift a finger against them!