"I have heard things, but I should
like to learn the truth from you. What are your plans?"
Her eyes were burning with inquiry. She was suddenly brought to the
gateways of a new world. Plans--what had she or her people to do with
plans! What Romany ever constructed anything? What did the building of a
city or a country mean to a Romany 'chal' or a Romany 'chi', they who
lived from field to field, from common to moor, from barn to city wall. A
Romany tent or a Romany camp, with its families, was the whole territory
of their enterprise, designs and patriotism. They saw the thousand places
where cities could be made, and built their fires on the sites of them,
and camped a day, and were gone, leaving them waiting and barren as
before. They travelled through the new lands in America from the fringe
of the Arctic to Patagonia, but they raised no roof-tree; they tilled no
acre, opened no market, set up no tabernacle: they had neither home nor
country.
Fleda was the heir of all this, the product of generations of such
vagabondage. Had the last few years given her the civic sense, the home
sense? From the influence of the Englishwoman, who had made her forsake
the Romany life, had there come habits of mind in tune with the women of
the Sagalac, who were helping to build so much more than their homes?
Since the incident of the Carillon Rapids she had changed, but what the
change meant was yet in her unopened Book of Revelations.
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