If he was to be allowed to do it--if he could do it--if it was to be paid for--it struck him that he would be a man set up for life.

If her ladyship had come and ordered it to be done, he would have thought the poor thing had gone mad.

But this one had it all jotted down in a clear hand, without the least feminine confusion of detail, and with here and there a little sharply-drawn sketch, such as a carpenter, if he could draw, which Buttle could not, might have made.
"There's not workmen enough in the village to do it in a year, miss," he said at last, with a gasp of disappointment.
She thought it over a minute, her pencil poised in her hand and her eyes on his face.
"Can you," she said, "undertake to get men from other villages, and superintend what they do?
If you can do that, the work is still passing through your hands, and Stornham will reap the benefit of it.

Your workmen will lodge at the cottages and spend part of their wages at the shops, and you who are a Stornham workman will earn the money to be made out of a rather large contract." Joe Buttle became quite hot.

If you have brought up a family for years on the proceeds of such jobs as driving a ten-penny nail in here or there, tinkering a hole in a cottage roof, knocking up a shelf in the vicarage kitchen, and mending a panel of fence, to be suddenly confronted with a proposal to engage workmen and undertake "contracts" is shortening to the breath and heating to the blood.
"Miss," he said, "we've never done big jobs, Sim Soames an' me.