“Well, you don’t. What chance do I get?” She stared fixedly at the fire. “I have to work, work, work, when all the time I feel like kicking up my heels like a colt in a pasture.” There was a strained, uneven quality in her tone that was foreign to it. I saw that she was terribly in earnest.
“A gipsy’s life isn’t all play, Wanza. It’s all right in poetry! And it’s all right for a gipsy. But Wanza Lyttle is better off in her peddler’s cart.”
“Well, I’d just like to try it for awhile!”
I remembered a song I had heard in Spokane—at Davenport’s roof garden—on a rare occasion when an artist chap who had spent some weeks at my shack had insisted on putting me up for a day or two while I visited the art shops in the city. It was a haunting thing, with a flowing happy lilt. I had been unable to forget it, and without thinking now, I sang it.
“Down the world with Marna!
That’s the life for me!
Wandering with the wandering wind
Vagabond and unconfined!
Roving with the roving rain
Its unboundaried domain!