The gist of the “Darrell case”, when you got right down to it, was a quarrel over property; it was the snarling of wolves who had been disturbed at their feeding. Darrell had denounced wealth and the exploiters of wealth, and now he had married a woman of wealth; and was he to get away with his prize? That was the meaning of all the loud halloo--for that the hounds were unleashed and the hunting-horns sounded. Thyrsis pictured the men who “wrote up” the Darrell story. He had known them in the newspaper-world--the servants of the giant publicity-machine; living and working in the roar and rush of it, in a stifling atmosphere where the finer qualities of the soul were poisoned and withered over night. They lived their lives, almost without exception, by means of alcohol and coffee and tobacco; they were scornful, disillusioned, cynical beyond all telling and all belief. Their only god in heaven or earth or the waters under the earth was “copy”. To such men there were two possible bonds of interest in a woman--the first being lust, and the second money. In the case of Henry Darrell they found both these motives; and so how clear the story was to them! Thyrsis thought, also, of the men who owned and managed the papers; those who had turned loose the hunt and directed it. Rich men were they, who had built these publicity machines for their own purposes. And what were they in their private lives? Some of them were notoriously dissolute; and still others hid their ways under a veil of hypocrisy--just as in their editorials they hid their class-interests under pretenses of principle. And how easy it would have been for Darrell to get what he wanted without losing his reputation--if only he had been willing to follow the example of these eminent citizens! Thyrsis knew one man, the editor of an appallingly respectable journal, who had invited a young girl to his wife’s home and there attempted to seduce her. He knew the proprietor of another, whose cheerful custom it was to go about among his newly-married women-friends and suggest that, inasmuch as he was a “superman,” and their husbands were weaklings, they should let him become in secret the father of their children. This amateur eugenist was accustomed to maintain that the great men in history had for the most part been bastards; and Thyrsis, knowing this fact about him, would read editorials in his papers, in which Henry Darrell was denounced as an enemy of the home!