belong will declare to you that you have been judged.  And if you are not capable even of caring whether you be justly judged or not, of what value can your secret be?  It must be stupid or hideous.  Chance has enabled you to produce a creature that you yourself lacked the quality to produce.  It is fortunate for him that a contrary chance should have permitted you to suppress him before he had fathomed the depths of your unconsciousness; more fortunate still that he does not survive the infinite series of your awful experiments.  He had nothing to do in a world where his intellect corresponded to no eternal intellect, where his desire for the better could attain no actual good.’

“Once more, for the spectacle to absorb us, there is no need of progress.  The enigma suffices; and that enigma is as great, and shines as mysteriously, in the peasants as in ourselves.  As we trace life back to its all-powerful principle, it confronts us on every side.  To this principle each succeeding century has given a new name.  Some of these names were clear and consoling.  It was found, however, that consolation and clearness were alike illusory.  But whether we call it God, Providence, Nature, chance, life, fatality, spirit, or matter, the mystery remains unaltered; and from the experience of thousands of years we have learned nothing more than to give it a vaster name, one nearer to ourselves, more congruous with our expectation, with the unforeseen.

That is the name it bears to-day, wherefore it has never seemed greater.  Here we have one of the numberless aspects of the third semblance, which also is truth.”

VII

THE MASSACRE OF THE MALES

[94]

If skies remain clear, the air warm, and pollen and nectar abound in the flowers, the workers, through a kind of forgetful indulgence, or over-scrupulous prudence perhaps, will for a short time longer endure the importunate, disastrous presence of the males.  These comport themselves in the hive as did Penelope’s suitors in the house of Ulysses.  Indelicate and wasteful, sleek and corpulent, fully content with their idle existence as honorary lovers, they feast and carouse, throng the alleys, obstruct the passages, and hinder the work; jostling and jostled, fatuously pompous, swelled with foolish, good-natured contempt; harbouring never a suspicion of the deep and calculating scorn wherewith the workers regard them, of the constantly growing hatred to which they give rise, or of the destiny that awaits them.  For their pleasant slumbers they select the snuggest corners of the hive; then, rising carelessly, they flock to the open cells where the honey smells sweetest, and soil with their excrements the combs they frequent.  The patient workers, their eyes steadily fixed on the future, will silently set things right.  From noon till three, when the purple country trembles in blissful lassitude