Probably There Is No More Steady- Headed Insect Than The Wasp, Unless It Be His Noble Cousin And Prince, The Hornet, Who Has A Quite Humanlike Unquenchable Thirst For Beer And Cider.

But the particular wasp at table I had in my mind remains to be spoken of.

I was lunching at the house of a friend, the vicar of a lonely parish in Hampshire, and besides ourselves there were five ladies, four of them young, at our round table. The window stood open, and by-and-by a wasp flew in and began to investigate the dishes, the plates, then the eaters themselves, impartially buzzing before each face in turn. On his last round, before taking his departure, he continued to buzz so long before my face, first in front of one eye then the other, as if to make sure that they were fellows and had the same expression, that I at length impatiently remarked that I did not care for his too flattering attentions. And that was really the only inconsiderate or inhospitable word his visit had called forth. Yet there were, I have said, five ladies present! They had neither welcomed nor repelled him, and had not regarded him; and although it was impossible to be unconscious of his presence at table, it was as if he had not been there. But then these ladies were cyclists: one, in addition to the beautiful brown colour with which the sun had painted her face, showed some dark and purple stains on cheek and forehead - marks of a resent dangerous collision with a stone wall at the foot of a steep hill.

Here I had intended telling about other meetings with other wasps, but having touched on a subject concerning which nothing is ever said and volumes might be written - namely, the Part played by the bicycle in the emancipation of women - I will go on with it. That they are not really emancipated doesn't matter, since they move towards that goal, and doubtless they would have gone on at the same old, almost imperceptible rate for long years but for the sudden impulse imparted by the wheel. Middle-aged people can recall how all England held up its hands and shouted "No, no!" from shore to shore at the amazing and upsetting spectacle of a female sitting astride on a safety machine, indecently moving her legs up and down just like a man. But having tasted the delights of swift easy motion, imparted not by any extraneous agency, but - oh, sweet surprise! - by her own in-dwelling physical energy, she refused to get off. By staying on she declared her independence; and we who were looking on - some of us - rejoiced to see it; for did we not also see, when these venturesome leaders returned to us from careering unattended over the country, when easy motion had tempted them long distances into strange, lonely places, where there was no lover nor brother nor any chivalrous person to guard and rescue them from innumerable perils - from water and fire, mad bulls and ferocious dogs, and evil-minded tramps and drunken, dissolute men, and from all venomous, stinging, creeping, nasty, horrid things - did we not see that they were no longer the same beings we had previously known, that in their long flights in heat and cold and rain and wind and dust they had shaken off some ancient weakness that was theirs, that without loss of femininity they had become more like ourselves in the sense that they were more self-centred and less irrational?

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