“I mean—is it worth while for me to go on writing? Can I ever have any influence?”
Thyrsis was shocked at the question—as he had been at the way Darrell took the whole thing. He knew that his friend had money enough to live comfortably; and why should any sort of criticism matter to a man who was economically free?
“Brother,” he said, “you have forgotten your Dante.”
“How do you mean?” asked the other.
“Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le gente!” quoted Thyrsis; and then he added, “You don’t seem to realize that these are newspapers, and nobody really credits them.”
“Ah, but they do!” cried Darrell. “You don’t know what I have been through with! My oldest friends have cut me! Clergymen have refused to sit at table with me! The organization that I gave ten years of my life to founding has gone all to pieces. I have been utterly ruined—I have been wiped out, destroyed!”
“But, my dear man,” Thyrsis argued, “you are setting out to teach a new doctrine, one that is abhorrent to people. And how can you expect to avoid being attacked? It seems to me that either you ought not to have done it, or else been prepared for some of this uproar.”
“But because a man becomes a Socialist, are they to libel him in these foul ways?”
“I don’t mean that. It’s not only that you are a Socialist, but that you have defied their marriage-laws.”
“But I haven’t!” exclaimed Darrel.