A Wasp At Table - Page 2

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?

But women, alas! can seldom follow up a victory. They are, as even the
poet when most anxious to make the best of them mournfully confesses:

variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made.

Inconstant in everything, they soon cast aside the toy which had taught
them so great a lesson and served them so well, carrying them so far in
the direction they wished to go. And no sooner had they cast it aside
than a fresh toy, another piece of mechanism, came on the scene to
captivate their hearts, and instead of a help, to form a hindrance. The
motor not only carried them back over all the ground they had covered
on the bicycle, but further still, almost back to the times of chairs
and fans and smelling-salts and sprained ankles at Lyme Regis. A
painful sight was