Who would have thought that Elizabeth Bowen could be so popular among wasps!

More precisely, among the sceliphron wasps, that is, the digging kind, which make out of clay such charming capsules, as though excavated in the land of Lilliput, and stuff them with little spiders and small insects. The growing wasp larva feeds on the provisions stored in these mud-walled cells, which look like tiny barrels. In our latitudes two species are the most common: Sceliphron deforme and Sceliphron curvatum.

It is amusing that, for rearing their offspring, the wasps chose a naive novel about the coming of age of the innocent sixteen-year-old Portia, who is orphaned and sent to the house of her grown-up half-brother and his wife, where she becomes an object of mockery for her artlessness, falls in love and, of course, is disappointed.

I can imagine how a growing wasp with such a background will one day write in her diary:

"It is sometimes hard for those who live on hopes to admit that they have been fulfilled. Hope is the most dangerous form of dreaming, and when dreams come true they come true in the real world, a difference that is felt dimly but often quite painfully. Anticipation was what she ought to have been enjoying since Friday morning, but it turned out that anticipation no longer brought her the same unclouded pleasure as before. Only a year ago she could scarcely wait for the joy promised to her; living through the time that remained until it was sheer torture. Now she suddenly wished that Saturday would not come so quickly, and with one hand, without realising it, she was waving it away. But there was no joy, nor any presence of mind either, yet she very much wanted to be alone somewhere for a long while, so as to find both again, which in itself showed how little of the child was left in her, and this loss, or rather this change in her character, struck Portia as forcibly as if the change had taken place in her body."