THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 177 
northward trend of her race, and then the folly of 
her own wisdom—intellect turning upon itself— 
all combined to lose for her the old slothful 
paradise of plenty. The drone, reasoning in- 
versely by the wisdom of his folly, made a better 
compromise with fate. He held to his life of ease 
and his gratuitous pleasures at all cost, and let his 
mate go her way undeterred, blinding his eyes to 
the new necessities. Work and responsibility 
gradually soured and sharpened and hardened the 
one, while dependence on his womenkind as in- 
sidiously changed the other into a creature of 
idleness and the senses. And when he came at 
last to realise the outcome of it all, it was too late. 
The matriarchal commonwealth was established, 
hedged round securely with a myriad poisoned 
blades. To live a drone had been his heart’s 
desire, and now dronehood, mere seminality, was 
allotted to him as a retribution. The things for 
which man lifts his unregarded prayer all his life 
through, might very well prove his fittest punish- 
ment, granted to him in the Hereafter: so little 
can man or drone distinguish between the enduring 
things of life and death. 
But of all intolerable fates, that must be least 
bearable, to have wisely willed and beautifully 
fashioned our own eternity ; and then, being only 
human, or at least reasonable, to find its goodness 
really smooth-going, colour-fast, impregnable at 
all points, with never a bright break or flaw to 
12 
