A Sea Upcast by Thomas A. Janvier

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 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.