I hadn't.
But Elizabeth mischievously declares that I had already pictured my first job thus:
Scene, a shining, fragrant dairy, with roses framing the open lattice. Myself, in a lilac sun-bonnet, looking like a lady land-worker out of some revue, and wielding a snowy, carved wooden implement with which I printed a clover-blossom design off on to innumerable pats of golden butter.
If this was "The Ideal," how different was "The Real" to which Vic pointed now!
My "little job"!
I had smelt it the moment that I'd entered the farmyard. As a child I'd seen Dad's roughest farm-lad engaged upon a similar "little job," and I'd been sorry for him—it had seemed not only such hard work, but so disgusting!
It involved spade work and a pitchfork, a wheelbarrow and the midden in the centre of the yard, on which a speckled hen and her brood were peering and running about. It also involved a dive into dark and very evil-smelling recesses, with noisome straw underfoot and festoons of grey cobwebs overhead. Never had I thought I should set foot—or nose—in such a place.
But it was in tones of the cheeriest matter-of-course that Vic concluded:
"Yes, you start cleaning out that cow-house."
That cow-house! Start cleaning it out! I——!