Whatever part of the world Tess came from, it was plain enough by the look of her—and more and more plain as she grew up into a tall and lanky girl, and then into a tall slim woman—that Suffolk was a long way off from the land where she was born.  
Our Suffolk folk, for the most part, are shortish and thickset and fair and blue eyed. We[186] men—being whipped about by the wind and weather, and the sea-salt tanned into us—lose our fairness early and go a bun-brown; but our women—having no salt spray in their faces, and only their just allowance of sunshine—have their blue eyes matched with the red and white cheeks that they were born with; and their hair, though sometimes it goes darkish, usually is a bright chestnut or a bright brown. Also, our women are steady-going and sensible; though I must say that now and then they are a bit hard to get along with: being given to doing their thinking slowly, and to being mighty fast set in their own notions when once they have made their minds up—the same as we men. As for Tess—with her black eyes and her black hair, and her face all a cream white with not a touch of red in it—she was like none of them; and she could think more out-of-the-way things and be more sorts of a girl in five minutes than any Suffolk lass that ever I came across could think or be in a whole year!
 
Tess was unlike our girls in another matter: she had a mighty hot spit-fire temper of her own. Our girls, the same as our men, are easy-going and anger slowly; but when they do anger they are glowing hot to their very finger-tips, and a[187] long while it takes them to cool off. But Tess would blaze up all in a minute—and as often as not with no real reason for it—and be for a while such an out-and-out little fury that she would send everything scudding before her; and then would pull up suddenly in the thick of it, and seem to forget all about it, and like enough laugh at the people around her looking scared! Somehow, though, it was seldom that she let me have a turn of her tantrums; and when she did they'd be over in no time, and she'd have her arms around me and be begging me to kiss her and to tell her that I didn't mind. I suppose that she was that way with me because for my part—having from the very first so loved her that quarreling with her was clean impossible—I used just to stand and stare at her in her passions; and like enough be showing by the look in my eyes the puzzled sorrow that I was feeling in my inside. As to answering her anger with my anger, it never once crossed my mind.
 
With John Heath things went differently. He would go ugly when she flew out at him—and would keep his anger by him after hers long was over and done with, and would show it by putting some hurt upon her in a dirty way.[188] A good many thrashings I gave John Heath, at one time or another, for that sort o............