e continued, "and desire to embrace him, though the
Chauffeur was a brute, a perfect brute--the most abhorrent man I have
ever known. His name was... strange, how I have forgotten his name.
Everybody called him Chauffeur--it was the name of his occupation, and
it stuck. That is how, to this day, the tribe he founded is called the
Chauffeur Tribe.

[Illustration: Everybody called him Chauffeur 149]

"He was a violent, unjust man. Why the plague germs spared him I can
never understand. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical
notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the
universe. Why did he live?--an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the
face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well. All he
could talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages--and
especially, and with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid
swindlings of the persons who had employed him in the days before the
coming of the plague. And yet he was spared, while hundreds of millions,
yea, billions, of better men were destroyed.

[Illustration: Vesta the one woman 150]

"I went on with him to his camp, and there I saw her, Vesta, the one
woman. It was glorious and... pitiful. There she was, Vesta Van Warden,
the young wife of John Van Warden, clad in rags, with marred and scarred
and toil-calloused hands, bending over the campfire and doing scullion
work--she, Vesta, who had been born to the purple of the greatest
baronage of wealth the world had ever known. John Van Warden, her
husband, worth one billion, eight hundred millions and President of the
Board of Industrial Magnates, had been the ruler of America. Also,
sitting on the International Board of Control, he had been one of the
seven men who ruled the world. And she herself had come of equally noble
stock. Her father, Philip Saxon, had been President of the Board of
Industrial Magnates up to the time of his death. This office was in
process of becoming hereditary, and had Philip Saxon had a son that son
would have succeeded him. But his only child was Vesta, the perfect
flower of generations of the highest culture this planet has ever
produced. It was not until the engagement between Vesta and Van Warden
took place, that Saxon indicated the latter as his successor. It was, I
am sure, a political marriage. I have reason to believe that Vesta never
really loved her husband in the mad passionate way of which the poets
used to sing. It was m