“Just about the best there is. His artificial tea and coffee would bring a fortune to the haven if there were a profitable market; even as it is it’ll bring a good piece of change. Wasteful? What would you have us do, hire cooks and servants?” “Theyre cheap enough.” “Or frightfully expensive. Specialization, the division of labor, is certainly not cheap in anything but dollars and cents, and not always then. And it’s unquestionably wasteful in terms of equality. And I don’t think there’s anyone at the haven who isn’t an egalitarian.” “But you do specialize and divide labor. Don’t tell me you swap your physics for Agati’s chemistry.” “In a way we do. Of course I don’t set up as an experimenter, any more than he does as a speculator. But there have been plenty of times Ive worked under his direction when he needed an assistant who didnt know anything but had a strong back.” “All right,” I said; “but I still don’t see why you can’t hire a cook and some dishwashers.” “Where would our equality be then? What would happen to our fellowship?” Haggershaven’s history, which I got little by little, was more than a link with the past; it was a possible hint of what might have been if the War of Southron Independence had not interrupted the American pattern. Barbara’s great-great-grandfather, Herbert Haggerwells, had been a Confederate major from North Carolina who, as conquerors sometimes do, had fallen in love with the then fat Pennsylvania countryside. After the war he had put everything—not much by Southron standards, but a fortune in depreciated, soon to be repudiated, United States greenbacks—into the farm which later formed the nucleus of Haggershaven. Then he married a local girl and transformed himself into a Northerner. Until I became too accustomed to notice it anymore I used to stare at his portrait in the library, picturing in idle fancy a possible meeting on the battlefield between this aristocratic gentleman with his curling mustache and daggerlike imperial and my own plebian Granpa Hodgins. But the chance of their ever having come face to face was much more than doubtful; I, who had studied both their likenesses, was the only link between them. “Hard looking character, ay?” commented Ace. “This was painted when he was mellow; imagine him twenty years earlier. Pistols cocked and Juvenal or Horace or Seneca in the saddlebags.” “He was a cavalry officer, then?” “I don’t know. Don’t think so as a matter of fact. Saddlebags was just my artistic touch. They say he was a holy terror; discipline and all that—it sort of goes with a man on horseback. And the old Roman boys are pure deduction; he was that type. Patronized several writers and artists; you know: ‘Drop down to my estate and stay a while’ and they stayed five or ten years.”