id Willock, laying aside his pipe.
"Honey, do yon know what I mean by a vision? It calls for a big vision
to take in a big person, and you ain't got it. Maybe it wasn't meant
for women, or at least a girl of fifteen to see further than her own
foot-tracks, so no blame laid and nobody judged, according. If you
don't see nothing in that army of settlers going into a raw land and
falling to work to make it bloom like the rose, a-setting out to live
in solitude for years that in due time the world may be richer by a
great territory, why, you ain't got a big vision. I've got it, for I
was born in the West, and I've lived all my life, peaceable and calm,
right out here or hereabouts. You've got to breathe western air to get
the big vision. You've got to see towns rise out of the turf over
night and bust into cities before the harvest-fields is ripe, to know
what can be did when men is free, not hampered by set-and-bound rules
as holds 'em down to the ways of their fathers. Back East, folks is
straining themselves to make over, and improve, and polish up what they
found ready-to-hand--but here out West, we creates. It takes a big
vision to see the bigness of the West, and you can't get no true idee
by squinting at the subject."

Lahoma did not reply, and Bill feared that under the conviction of her
friend's eloquence, she had begun to idealize the efforts of Wilfred
Compton. He need not have been afraid. To her imagination, "big
people" were not living in dugouts, or tents, far from civilization;
"big people" were going to the opera every night, and riding in
splendid carriages along imposing boulevards every day. Brick and Bill
had contrived to live as well as they desired from profits on skins
obtained in the mountains and the small tract of ground they had
cultivated in a desultory manner had done little beyond supplying
themselves with vegetables and the horses with some extra feed. She
had no great opinion of agriculture; and though she had taken part in
planting and hoeing with a pleasurable zest, she had never entertained
herself with the thought that she was engaged in a great work. As to
dugouts, they had no place in her dreams of the future. Since Wilfred
had chosen to handicap himself with the same limitations that bound
her, even the thought of him was to be banished from her world,
banished absolutely.

Her day-dreams did not cease, but became more dreamy, more unreal,
since the hero of her fancies,