weighing the risk against her famished hunger--possibly her late
husband had been her last meal, months ago--marking the vital spot upon
her prey, aiming for the shot, which must be true, for one does not
miss in attacking a wasp--and live. Only, she would not have risked it
at all, perhaps, if the wasp had seemed alive, or more alive, at any
rate.

Then came the shot--one cannot in justice call it a spring; it was too
instant to be termed that. The spider simply was upon the wasp without
seeming to go there; but the wasp was not there, or, rather, her vital
spot wasn't. She had kicked herself round on her side, like a
cart-wheel, lying flat, with her feet, and the spider's jaws struck
only hard cuirass. Before the spider, leaping back, wolf-like, could
lunge in her lightning second stroke, the wasp was on her feet, a live
thing, after all.

The warmth had been already soaking the message of spring into her
cold-drugged brain, and now this sudden attack had finished what the
warmth had begun. She was awake, on her feet, a live and dangerous
proposition; groggy, it is true; dazed, half-working, so to speak; but
a force to be reckoned with--after half-a-year. And one saw, too, at a
glance that she was different from ordinary wasps--would make two, in
fact, of any ordinary wasp; and her great jaws looked as if they could
eat one and comfortably deal with more; whilst her dagger-sting, now
unsheathed and ready--probably for the first time--could deliver a
wound twice as deep and deadly as the ordinary wasp. She was, in
short, a queen-wasp; a queen of the future, if Fate willed; a queen as
yet without a kingdom, a sovereign uncrowned, but of regal proportions
and queenly aspect, for all that; for in the insect world royalties are
fashioned upon a super-standard that marks them off from the common