"You mean that you do not have to study, to study books, long rows of books, in order to know how to live?" asked the baby in surprise. "If so then it is no wonder that my father writes about you as he does; that he says you are the example for us all; and that you and your cousins the, er, Formicidae...."
"Oh, the ants, yes. That we are ...?"
"That you are the true successes among all the animals because your knowledge has led you to establish the perfect society, and to become the only true communists among them all. He says that your life should be the guide for ours; that when we human beings can thoroughly adopt your ways we shall have solved all our problems."
"How wonderfully you talk!" interrupted the bee. "I suppose that comes from reading. You do read a lot, I suppose?"
"Well, I am making a beginning, yes," answered the baby with a sigh. "But it is discouraging sometimes. Here I've only just got through the Encyclopedia Britannica and now they have turned out a new edition. But I get a great deal of my knowledge of life from hearing my father and mother talk; and my nurse, she is a very superior person, too."
"Your father writes books? He is a literary man, then?" asked the bee.
"Oh, no; not at all. He is a scientific man. He writes books only because he has such important things to tell the people."
"And he writes about me and my cousins the ants? He tells the people that they should live as we do? Well, that is encouraging. To tell the truth, some of us have rather envied you humans. We have wanted to be like you."
"Oh, that is silly. Anyway, to be like us in our present stage of evolution."
"In your present stage of, of—I am afraid I don't quite understand," said the bee, rubbing one antenna over its face in a rather bewildered way.