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    The Great Gatsby & Related Stories: The Library of America Corrected Text
    The Great Gatsby & Related Stories: The Library of America Corrected Text
    The Great Gatsby & Related Stories: The Library of America Corrected Text
    Ebook409 pages6 hours

    The Great Gatsby & Related Stories: The Library of America Corrected Text

    By F. Scott Fitzgerald and James L. W. West, III

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    Library of America presents the definitive novel of the Jazz Age in an authoritative new text—along with a quartet of brilliant stories that explore variations on the theme of desperate longing for an unattainable someone or something

    Boats against the current, we are borne back ceaselessly to The Great Gatsby. Its unforgettable characters—the conflicted narrator Nick Carraway, the golden girl Daisy Buchanan, and the mysterious Jay Gatsby—its indelible symbols and soaring prose, and its large themes of money, class, and American optimism have an enduring fascination and make The Great Gatsby a frequent candidate for “the Great American novel.” 

    Now readers can experience F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece in an edition that brings us closest to his original vision for the work. Drawn from the authoritative Library of America edition of Fitzgerald’s collected writings, this deluxe paperback presents a new, corrected text of The Great Gatsby by preeminent Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III, incorporating emendations the author made on galley proofs and in his personal copy of the book. 

    Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is joined here by four contemporary stories—the “Gatsby cluster”—in which he explores variations on the theme of desperate longing for an unattainable someone or something: “Winter Dreams,” “The Rich Boy,” “Absolution,” and “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les.” Essential reading for fans of the novel, these, too, are presented in newly corrected texts. 

    Rounding out this special edition is a selection of thirteen letters between Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, about the composition, editing, and publication of The Great Gatsby, offering a fascinating glimpse into the genesis of an American classic. Other features include a preface by the editor, a detailed chronology of Fitzgerald’s life and career, and helpful explanatory and textual notes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLibrary of America
    Release dateSep 5, 2023
    ISBN9781598537574
    The Great Gatsby & Related Stories: The Library of America Corrected Text
    Author

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University in 1913, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and he quickly became a central figure in the American expatriate circle in Paris that included Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of forty-four.

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      Book preview

      The Great Gatsby & Related Stories - F. Scott Fitzgerald

      Fitz9781598537574.jpg

      The proceeds from the sale of this book will be used to support

      the mission of Library of America, a nonprofit organization that

      champions the nation’s cultural heritage by publishing America’s

      greatest writing in authoritative new editions and providing

      resources for readers to explore this rich, living legacy.

      TheGreatGatsbyTitlePage.png

      The Great Gatsby and Related Stories

      Copyright © 2023 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.,

      New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.

      F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter of January 15, 1925, to Maxwell Perkins, and Perkins’s letters of January 20, 1925, and February 24, 1925, to Fitzgerald from Dear Scott/Dear Max. Edited by John Kuehl and Jackson Bryer. Copyright © 1971 Charles Scribner’s Sons. All other letters from A Life in Letters by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Edited by Matthew Bruccoli. Copyright © 1994 by The Trustees under agreement dated July 3, 1975, created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

      Published in the United States by Library of America.

      Visit our website at www.loa.org.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without

      the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief

      quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Random House Inc.

      and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.

      ISBN 978–1–59853–756–7

      eISBN 978–1–59853–757–4

      Contents

      Preface

      This volume brings together F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby (1925) and four related stories that share the novel’s themes and preoccupations, all in newly edited, corrected texts prepared for Library of America. This edition also includes a selection of correspondence between Fitzgerald and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, concerning the composition and revision of the novel.

      In preparing this new text of The Great Gatsby, I have consulted Fitzgerald’s manuscript, his working galleys, and his personal reading copy of the novel. This volume presents the first printing of the 1925 Scribner’s edition, lightly emended in various ways, with the majority of the alterations made on Fitzgerald’s authority. Control of the text has been given to Fitzgerald. The treatment of the text for this edition is similar to the cleaning and restoration of a work of art that has deteriorated, ever so slightly, over time. The goal of these labors is to capture accurately the author’s intentions for the novel, as nearly as those intentions can be recovered from the evidence that survives. Readers interested in a more detailed understanding of the textual work undertaken for The Great Gatsby and the other selections in this volume should consult the Note on the Texts.

      The Great Gatsby is probably the most widely read American novel of the twentieth century. It is a fast-moving story told by a narrator, Nick Carraway, whom we like and trust. Its characters are indelibly drawn: Jay Gatsby, with his mysterious origins and air of danger; Daisy Buchanan, with her voice full of money; Tom Buchanan, rich, overbearing, and belligerent; Jordan Baker, wan and faintly arrogant. The minor characters are memorable. Fitzgerald has given us George and Myrtle Wilson, desperate to escape their marginal lives; Myrtle’s sister Catherine, with her sticky bob of red hair; Chester McKee, showing Nick his murky photographic studies; Chester’s wife, Lucille, languid, handsome, and horrible; Meyer Wolfshiem, exhibiting his peculiar cufflinks to Nick; Ewing Klipspringer, performing his liver exercises on the floor; Owl Eyes, peering at the unopened books in Gatsby’s library. And there is Gatsby’s aquaplane, his medal from Little Montenegro, his piles of beautiful shirts, his pink suit, the parties on his blue lawn, the stylish dancing and hot jazz, the glamorous and dissipated guests—all of this stays in the mind.

      The four stories included in this volume are closely related to The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald often used short stories as trial grounds for characters, settings, themes, and narrative approaches that he would later employ in his novels. This is particularly true for The Great Gatsby. Winter Dreams—which Fitzgerald, in an undated letter of June 1925 to Perkins, called a 1st draft of the Gatsby idea—is a poignant rich girl/poor boy narrative that the author wrote almost three years before publication of the novel. Judy Jones, the golden girl of Winter Dreams, becomes a much desired ideal for Dexter Green. He achieves conventional success but cannot win her heart. By the end of the story he is disillusioned, unable to accept the passage of time and the inevitability of change. Absolution, a tense story about an adolescent boy and a priest, was salvaged from the original ur-text of The Great Gatsby, a first attempt at the novel set by Fitzgerald in the upper Midwest. Rudolph Miller, the youthful hero, yearns to escape from the limitations of his upbringing and the suffocating influence of the Catholic church, much as Jay Gatsby desires to move beyond his own humble origins in North Dakota. Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les is a work of light fiction, a romantic fantasy in which the stalwart hero, John M. Chestnut, eventually captures the impossible Rags Martin-Jones. He creates a glittering, illusory world in order to attract her, much as Jay Gatsby stages his glamorous parties in hopes of luring Daisy Buchanan, the object of his dreams, to his ersatz mansion. The Rich Boy, the longest of the stories in this volume, was written just after publication of The Great Gatsby. The action of the story is seen through the eyes of a character who resembles Nick Carraway. This nameless narrator has observed the very rich and found them to be different from you and me. He is a keen observer who recognizes the differences between old and new money. He comes to understand that his friend, a rich boy named Anson Hunter, nourishes a sense of superiority and privilege that takes precedence over all else, even emotional commitment and love.

      Fitzgerald had a close relationship with Maxwell Perkins. The correspondence between the two men reveals a great deal about the inception, composition, revision, and publication of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald relied on Perkins for professional advice; he also valued the editor’s critiques of his manuscripts, especially in matters of structure and characterization. In the letters written during the composition and revision of The Great Gatsby, we can see Perkins’s influence on the novel, especially on the manner in which Jay Gatsby’s past is revealed. Particularly important here is the November 20, 1924, letter from Perkins to Fitzgerald. In this letter Perkins confesses to Fitzgerald that, for him, Gatsby is somewhat vague. Perkins continues: The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. Part of the problem for Perkins was that, in the early version of the novel he was reading, the details of Gatsby’s past were not revealed until very nearly the end of the book. Perkins urged Fitzgerald to drop hints about Gatsby’s past life earlier in the narrative, with phrases, and possibly incidents, little touches of various kinds, that would suggest that he was in some active way mysteriously engaged. Fitzgerald took this advice, along with other suggestions in the letter, and put his novel through a major revision in galley proofs, giving us the text that we know today. In this revised version we learn much earlier about Jay Gatsby’s past, with further details revealed as the narrative unfolds.

      The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. The period of its composition was his finest hour: inspiration, talent, self-discipline, and luck came together magically to create a novel that has an enduring hold on the popular imagination and continues to win new readers. Fitzgerald had a pitch-perfect ear for language and a gift for dialogue. Many of the passages in the novel are unforgettable: Daisy and Jordan dressed in white, floating on the sofa in Daisy’s sunroom; Nick woozy with drink in Tom and Myrtle’s love nest; Gatsby smiling down on his departing guests from the steps of his mansion; Nick riding with Gatsby in his gorgeous yellow car, whirling through the Valley of Ashes on the way to the glamorous streets of Manhattan. At the end of the novel Fitzgerald leaves us gazing at the green light on Daisy’s dock. It shines through the night from across the bay. Readers know what the green light signifies, even if they cannot put it into words. The Great Gatsby captures something uniquely American: our hopes and fantasies, our sense of infinite possibility, our disappointment when our dreams are not fulfilled. That’s quite a lot for one short novel.

      J. L. W. W. III

      page1.png

      once again

      TO

      ZELDA

      Chapter I

      In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

      Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

      He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

      And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the creative temperament—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

      ◆

      My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

      I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, Why—ye-es, with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

      The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

      It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

      How do you get to West Egg Village? he asked helplessly.

      I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

      And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

      There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man. This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

      It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

      I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

      Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

      Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

      Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

      And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

      He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

      His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

      Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final, he seemed to say, just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are. We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

      We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

      I’ve got a nice place here, he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

      Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.

      It belonged to Demaine, the oil man. He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. We’ll go inside.

      We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

      The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

      The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

      The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

      I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.

      She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

      At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

      I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered Listen, a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

      I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

      Do they miss me? she cried ecstatically.

      The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the North Shore.

      How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow! Then she added irrelevantly: You ought to see the baby.

      I’d like to.

      "She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?"

      Never.

      Well, you ought to see her. She’s——

      Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

      What you doing, Nick?

      I’m a bond man.

      Who with?

      I told him.

      Never heard of them, he remarked decisively.

      This annoyed me.

      You will, I answered shortly. You will if you stay in the East.

      Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry, he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. I’d be a God Damn fool to live anywhere else.

      At this point Miss Baker said: Absolutely! with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she had uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

      I’m stiff, she complained. I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.

      Don’t look at me, Daisy retorted. I’ve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.

      No, thanks, said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry. I’m absolutely in training.

      Her host looked at her incredulously.

      You are! He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. How you ever get anything done is beyond me.

      I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she got done. I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

      You live in West Egg, she remarked contemptuously. I know somebody there.

      I don’t know a single——

      You must know Gatsby.

      Gatsby? demanded Daisy. What Gatsby?

      Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

      Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

      "Why candles? objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year. She looked at us all radiantly. Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

      We ought to plan something, yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

      All right, said Daisy. What’ll we plan? She turned to me helplessly: What do people plan?

      Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

      Look! she complained. I hurt it.

      We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.

      You did it, Tom, she said accusingly. "I know you didn’t mean to, but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a——"

      I hate that word hulking, objected Tom crossly, even in kidding.

      Hulking, insisted Daisy.

      Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

      You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy, I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. Can’t you talk about crops or something?

      I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

      Civilization’s going to pieces, broke out Tom violently. "I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?"

      Why, no, I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

      Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.

      Tom’s getting very profound, said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we——

      Well, these books are all scientific, insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.

      We’ve got to beat them down, whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

      You ought to live in California— began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his

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