According to our Suffolk notions, Grace Gryce was a beauty: being strongly set up and full built and well rounded, with cheeks as red as strawberries, and blue eyes that for any good looking man had a smile in them, and over all a head of bright-brown hair. Had Tess been out of the way she'd have had things all as she wanted them, not another girl in the village for looks coming near her; and so it was only human nature, I suppose, that she hated Tess for crossing her—making her always go second, and a bad second, with the men.  
It was about John Heath, though, that the[191] heart of the matter was. All the village knew that Grace fancied him, and that he half fancied her—and would have fancied her altogether had Tess been out of the way. Making up his mind between them—John always was a thick thinker—did not seem to come easy to him. The whims and the ways of Tess—that made a dozen different sorts of girl of her in five minutes—seemed to set him off from her a-most as much as they set him on: being a sort of puzzle, I'm free to say, that other men beside John couldn't well understand. With Grace it was different. She might blow hot or she might blow cold with him; or she might show her temper—she had a-plenty of it—and give him the rough side of her tongue: but what she meant and what she wanted always was plain and clear. To be sure, this is only my guess why he hung in the wind between them. Maybe he set too little store on Tess's love because it came to him too easily; maybe he thought that by seeming to love her lightly he best could hold her fast.
 
Hold her fast he did, and that is certain. In spite of all her whimsies, he had her love; and it was his, as I have said, from the time when he man-mastered her by boxing the little ears of her—she being only ten years old. Al[192]ways after that, even when she was at her sauciest and her airiest, he had only to speak short and sharp to her and she'd come to heel to him like a dog. Sometimes, seeing her taking orders from him that way was close to setting me wild: I having my whole heart fixed on her, and ready to give the very hands of me to have from her the half of what she gave him. Not but what she loved me too, in her own fashion, and dearly. She showed that by the way that she used to come to me in all her little hurts and troubles; and the sweetness and the comfortingness of her to me and to my mother always, but most when my poor father was drowned, was beyond any words that I have to put it in. But my pain was that the love which she had for me was of the same sort that she had for my mother—and I was not wanting from her love of that kind. And so it cut to the quick of me—I who would have kissed her shoe-soles—to see her so ready always to be meek and humble at a word from John. There were times, and a good many of them—seeing her so dog-faithful to him, and he almost as careless of her as if she had been no more than a dog to him—that I saw red as I looked at him, and got burning hot in the insides of me, and was as close to murder[193]ing him as I well could be and he still go on alive.
 
Like enough Grace Gryce—being of the same stock that I was, and made much as I was—had the same feeling for Tess that I had for John; and Grace, being a woman, had nothing to stop her from murdering Tess in a woman's way. She would have done it sooner had her wits been quicker. Time and again they had had their word-fights together, and Tess always getting the better of her because Grace's wits, like the rest of her, were heavy and slow.
 
It was down by the boats, under the Gun Hill, that they fought the round out in which Grace drew blood at last. A lot of the girls were together there and Tess, for a wonder, happened to be with them. They all were saying to her what hard things they could think of; and she, in her quick way, was hitting back at them and scoring off them all. Poor sort of stuff it was that they were giving her: calling her "Miss Fine-Airs" and "Miss Maypole," and scorning the black eyes and the pale face of her, and girding at her the best they could because in no way was she like themselves.
 
"It's a pity I'm so many kinds of ugliness!" says Tess in her saucy way, and making it worse[194] by laughing. "It's a true pity that I'm not pretty, like all the rest of you, and so am left lonely. If only I'd some of your good looks, you see, I might have, as the rest of you have, a l............