I decided to call to him.

Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that

would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation
that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in
a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling.
Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green
light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked
once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet
darkness.

Assignment 6
1. Read Chapters II and III.

2. Study the vocabulary and define the contextual meaning of these lexical units.
Recount the episodes from the novel in which the given vocabulary is employed.

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

 transcendent  brood on over

 obscure  take hold of
 virtues  pick one's words with care
 shrewd  make sense
 divergence  in disdain
 poignant  in despair
 loiter  (couldn’t) keep one's eyes off smb
 bizarre  be through with
 bona-fide  in a daze
 speculation  to know one from another
 thrill  on the spot
 prosperous  in the same breath
 innuendo  ill at ease
 assert  on guard
 imply  take smth. for granted
 hauteur  beyond credibility
 elaborated  no harm in trying
 commence
 reluctant
 haughty
 interpose
 sumptuous
3. Transcribe the following words:
Transcendent, obscure, virtues, shrewd, divergence, poignant, loiter, bizarre, bona-
fide, speculation, thrill, prosperous, innuendo, assert, imply, hauteur, elaborated,
commence, reluctant, haughty, interpose, sumptuous.

4. Match the given words with their definitions.

1. transcendent 1. to make someone feel very excited and pleased

2. obscure 2. able to judge people and situations very well and to
make good decisionsvague
3. virtues 3. the use of insulting or negative comments about
someone that are suggested rather than stated directly, or
one of these comments
4. shrewd 4. ideas or discussion about why something has happened
or what might happen
5. divergence 5. to state firmly that something is true
6. poignant 6. strange and difficult to explain
7. loiter 7. rich and successful
8. bizarre 8. a good quality or habit that a person has, especially a
moral one such as honesty or loyalty
9. bona-fide 9. to suggest that you think something without saying it
directly
10.speculation 10.giving you feelings of sadness
11.thrill 11.a person or thing is really what they seem to be or what
they claim to be
12.prosperous 12.very detailed and complicated
13.innuendo 13.not limited or influenced by negative attitudes, thoughts,
or feelings
14.assert 14.not willing to do something
15.imply 15.proud and unfriendly
16.hauteur 16.not clearly expressed, or not easy to understand
17.elaborated 17.to begin, or to begin something
18.commence 18.to say something that interrupts a conversation
19.reluctant 19.impressive, expensive, and of high quality
20.haughty 20.proud and unfriendly behaviour
21.interpose 21.- a difference in the way that two or more things develop
from the same thing
22.sumptuous 22.to move slowly, often stopping to rest

5. Translate the following sentences into Ukrainian:

1. She wore a bizarre outfit.
2. We took it for granted that we'd be invited to the party.
3. I'm usually ill at ease when addressing a large crowd of people.
4. He brooded over his mistake.
5. She finally gave up in despair.
6. Kevin seemed to wander around in a daze half the time.
 7. I have a disdain for companies that mistreat their workers.
8. The festivities will commence with a parade.
9. He took hold of the rope.
10. We read the recommendations and thought they made (perfect)
sense.

6. Fill in the spaces in the sentences below with a suitable word:

shrewd reluctant imply thrill

prosperous haughty loiter virtues obscure

1. He might agree but seems __________ to admit it.

2. An off-road vehicle, as its name __________, is designed for use where there
are no roads.
3. The __________waiter smirked when I remarked that it was odd that a
French restaurant didn't even have french fries on the menu.
4. He predicted a __________ future.
5. __________ing is prohibited outside the theaters.
6. Two young __________-seekers had climbed onto the roof of a train.
7. The __________ of wool as a clothing material is that it can provide
insulation from the cold even when wet.
8. He also appears __________ and tough.
9. The origins of the language are ___________.

7. Make your own sentences with the following words and expressions:
 to take hold of  to know one from the another
 pick one’s words with care on the spot
interpose  there’s no harm in (doing sth)
 keep one’s eyes off smb innuendo
 be trough with  on guard

8. Find in the text words and phases with the following meanings:
1. прихований______________________________
2. тьмяно______________________________
3. кивнути головою______________________________
4. повна жінка______________________________
5. весело вдарив його по плечу______________________________
6. у повному розпалі______________________________
7. зменшуватись ______________________________
8. задарма, майже нічого______________________________
9. бути схожим на ______________________________
10.голосно позіхнув______________________________
11.крутиться на язиці______________________________
12.затримався трошки, щоб потиснути руку__________________________
 13.оглянув з голови до ніг______________________________
14.стрункий______________________________
15.він стиснув кулаки______________________________
16.закуска______________________________
9. Use the infinitive or gerund:

1. That's a dog that'll never bother you with _____________ (catch) cold."
2. We had an awful time _____________ (get) back, I can tell you.
3. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests _____________ (to drive)
from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach...
4. Welcome or not, I found it necessary _____________ (attach) myself to
someone before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.
5. It faced — or seemed _____________ (face) — the whole external world for
an instant, and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in
your favor.
6. A dim background started _____________ (take) shape behind him but at her
next remark it faded away.
7. I began _____________ (like) New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at
night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and
machines gives to the restless eye.
8. "No harm ____________ (try)," he said.
9. "Well, if you're a poor driver you oughtn't to try _____________ (drive) at
night."
10.I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table — the only place in the garden
where a single man could linger without _____________ (look) purposeless
and alone.

10. Put the following dialogue into the reported speech:

"We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."

"Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's
business?"
"I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going
to sell me that car?"
"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."
"Works pretty slow, don't he?"
"No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe
I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."
"I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant — "

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

Here are the points for you to present the analyses of the second and third
chapters. Using the text for proving and supporting your ideas is required.

1. Give a character sketch of Myrtle. Why is the author so specific about her flat,
furniture, her books, her guests?
2. Compare Daisy and Myrtle.
3. Sum up all the references to Gatsby.
4. What is comic and what is tragic in these chapters?
5. Gatsby's party. Pick out the details in its description suggestive of the scope of
the host's wealth and prodigality.
6. Gatsby's guests. What sort of people were attracted by the party? What layer of
society did they represent?
7. Pick out episodes that show the behaviour of the same people when the party was
at the full swing and when it was at the end of it.
8. Nick meets Gatsby. Dwell on Gatsby's appearance and manner of speech.
9. Read the following. Do you agree with the given interpretation of Gatsby's smile
given by literary critics. How would you interpret the given passage.
He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you
may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole
external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible
prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be
understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.
This passage occurs in Chapter 3 as part of Nick’s first close examination of
Gatsby’s character and appearance. This description of Gatsby’s smile captures both
the theatrical quality of Gatsby’s character and his charisma. Additionally, it
encapsulates the manner in which Gatsby appears to the outside world, an image
Fitzgerald slowly deconstructs as the novel progresses. One of the main facets of
Gatsby’s persona is that he acts out a role that he defined for himself when he was
seventeen years old. His smile seems to be both an important part of the role and a
result of the singular combination of hope and imagination that enables him to play
it so effectively. Here, Nick describes Gatsby’s rare focus — he has the ability to
make anyone he smiles at feel as though he has chosen that person out of “the whole
external world,” reflecting that person’s most optimistic conception of him- or
herself.
10. Speak about relationships of Nick and Jordan Baker.

CHAPTER 2

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily
joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from
a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where
ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take
the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent
effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly
creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden
spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations
from your sight.
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly
over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes
of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their retinas are one yard high.
They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles
which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them
there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself
into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little
by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping
ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when
the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare
at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least
a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress.
The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His
acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and,
leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though
I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her — but I did. I went up to New
York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he
jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car.
"We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."
I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have
my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday
afternoon I had nothing better to do.
I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back
a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only
building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste
land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely
nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-
night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage — Repairs.
GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold — and I followed Tom inside.
The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-
covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that
this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic
apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the
door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless
man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang
into his light blue eyes.
"Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder.
"How's business?"
"I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going
to sell me that car?"
"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."
"Works pretty slow, don't he?"
 "No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe
I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."
"I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant — "
His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I
heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked
out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout,
but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a
spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but
there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body
were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband
as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she
wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:
"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."
"Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office,
mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled
his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity — except his
wife, who moved close to Tom.
"I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train."
"All right."
"I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level."
She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with
two chairs from his office door.
We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before
the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row
along the railroad track.
"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor
Eckleburg.
"Awful."
"It does her good to get away."
"Doesn't her husband object?"
"Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he
doesn't know he's alive."
So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York — or
not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that
much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.
She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her
rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand
she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a moving-picture magazine and, in the
station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the
solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new
one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of
the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the
window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass.
"I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for
the apartment. They're nice to have — a dog."
 We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John
D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent
puppies of an indeterminate breed.
"What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-
window.
"All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?"
"I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?"
The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew
one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.
"That's no police dog," said Tom.
"No, it's not exactly a polICE dog," said the man with disappointment in his
voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a
back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with
catching cold."
"I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?"
"That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten
dollars."
The airedale — undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it
somewhere though its feet were startlingly white — changed hands and settled
down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture.
"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately.
"That dog? That dog's a boy."
"It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten
more dogs with it."
We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the
summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of
white sheep turn the corner.
"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here."
"No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't
come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?"
"Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be
very beautiful by people who ought to know."
"Well, I'd like to, but — "
We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds.
At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of
apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood,
Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in.
"I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the
elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too."
The apartment was on the top floor — a small living room, a small dining
room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a
set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to
stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The
only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred
rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and
the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies
of "Town Tattle "lay on the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and
some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned
with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to
which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits — one of which
decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom
brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door.
I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that
afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until
after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs.
Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and
I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had
disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon
Called Peter" — either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it
didn't make any sense to me.
Just as Tom and Myrtle — after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called
each other by our first names — reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the
apartment door.
The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid
sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had
been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of
nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face.
When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery
bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary
haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived
here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud
and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.
Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below. He had just
shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he was most
respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he was in
the "artistic game" and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the
dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the
wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible. She told me with pride
that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they
had been married.
Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now
attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a
continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her
personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so
remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her
gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as
she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on
a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.
"My dear," she told her sister in a high mincing shout, "most of these fellas
will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last
week to look at my feet and when she gave me the bill you'd of thought she had my
appendicitus out."
 "What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. McKee.
"Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people's feet in their own
homes."
"I like your dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable."
Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.
"It's just a crazy old thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when I
don't care what I look like."
"But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued Mrs.
McKee. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something
of it."
We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson who removed a strand of hair from
over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee regarded her
intently with his head on one side and then moved his hand back and forth slowly in
front of his face.
"I should change the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring out the
modelling of the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair."
"I wouldn't think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee. "I think it's — "
Her husband said "SH!" and we all looked at the subject again whereupon
Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.
"You McKees have something to drink," he said. "Get some more ice and
mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep."
"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the
shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep after them all the
time."
She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the
dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs
awaited her orders there.
"I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.
Tom looked at him blankly.
"Two of them we have framed downstairs."

"Two what?" demanded Tom.

"Two studies. One of them I call 'Montauk Point — the Gulls,' and the other
I call 'Montauk Point — the Sea.' "
The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.
"Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she inquired.
"I live at West Egg."
"Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named
Gatsby's. Do you know him?"
"I live next door to him."
"Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's where
all his money comes from."
"Really?"
She nodded.
"I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me."
 This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs.
McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:
"Chester, I think you could do something with HER," she broke out, but Mr.
McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to Tom.
"I'd like to do more work on Long Island if I could get the entry. All I ask is
that they should give me a start."
"Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Mrs.
Wilson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a letter of introduction, won't you,
Myrtle?"
"Do what?" she asked, startled.
"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do
some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented. "George
B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,' or something like that."
Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can
stand the person they're married to."
"Can't they?"
"Can't STAND them." She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. "What I say
is, why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a
divorce and get married to each other right away."
"Doesn't she like Wilson either?"
The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle who had overheard
the question and it was violent and obscene.
"You see?" cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. "It's
really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a Catholic and they don't believe in
divorce."
Daisy was not a Catholic and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of
the lie.
"When they do get married," continued Catherine, "they're going west to live
for a while until it blows over."
"It'd be more discreet to go to Europe."
"Oh, do you like Europe?" she exclaimed surprisingly. "I just got back from
Monte Carlo."
"Really."
"Just last year. I went over there with another girl."
"Stay long?"
"No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of Marseilles.
We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started but we got gypped out of it all
in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you.
God, how I hated that town!"
The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue
honey of the Mediterranean — then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back
into the room.
"I almost made a mistake, too," she declared vigorously. "I almost married a
little kyke who'd been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept
saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's way below you!' But if I hadn't met Chester, he'd
of got me sure."
 "Yes, but listen," said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down, "at
least you didn't marry him."
"I know I didn't."
"Well, I married him," said Myrtle, ambiguously. "And that's the difference
between your case and mine."
"Why did you, Myrtle?" demanded Catherine. "Nobody forced you to."
Myrtle considered.
"I married him because I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally. "I
thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe."
"You were crazy about him for a while," said Catherine.
"Crazy about him!" cried Myrtle incredulously. "Who said I was crazy
about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there."
She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried
to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.
"The only CRAZY I was was when I married him. I knew right away I
made a mistake. He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in and never even
told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out. She looked
around to see who was listening: "Oh, is that your suit?' I said. 'This is the first I
ever heard about it.' But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the
band all afternoon."
"She really ought to get away from him," resumed Catherine to me.
"They've been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tom's the first sweetie
she ever had."
The bottle of whiskey — a second one — was now in constant demand by
all present, excepting Catherine who "felt just as good on nothing at all." Tom rang
for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a complete
supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park
through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild
strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high
over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human
secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up
and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by
the inexhaustible variety of life.
Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath poured
over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.
"It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones
left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night.
He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes and I couldn't keep my eyes off him
but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement
over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me and his white shirt-
front pressed against my arm — and so I told him I'd have to call a policeman, but
he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn't hardly
know I wasn't getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over,
was 'You can't live forever, you can't live forever.' "
She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial laughter.
 "My dear," she cried, "I'm going to give you this dress as soon as I'm
through with it. I've got to get another one tomorrow. I'm going to make a list of all
the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave and a collar for the dog and one of
those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk
bow for mother's grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won't
forget all the things I got to do."
It was nine o'clock — almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch
and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his
lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from
his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the
afternoon.
The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the
smoke and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared,
made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other,
found each other a few feet away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and
Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs.
Wilson had any right to mention Daisy's name.
"Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. "I'll say it whenever I want to!
Daisy! Dai — "
Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open
hand.
Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women's
voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee
awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone half
way he turned around and stared at the scene — his wife and Catherine scolding and
consoling as they stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with articles
of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch bleeding fluently and trying to spread
a copy of "Town Tattle" over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then Mr. McKee
turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier I followed.
"Come to lunch some day," he suggested, as we groaned down in the
elevator.
"Where?"
"Anywhere."
"Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the elevator boy.
"I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't know I was
touching it."
"All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to."
. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets,
clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
"Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . . Brook'n
Bridge . . . ."
Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania
Station, staring at the morning "Tribune" and waiting for the four o'clock train.

CHAPTER 3
 There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In
his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings
and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests
diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while
his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts
of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and
from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station
wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight
servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes
and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in
New York — every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a
pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract
the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two
hundred times by a butler's thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several
hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of
Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-
d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry
pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass
rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten
that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived — no thin five-piece affair but a
whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and
piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach
now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the
drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors
and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The
bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside
until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions
forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew
each other's names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the
orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key
higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a
cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve
and form in the same breath — already there are wanderers, confident girls who
weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous
moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the
sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the
air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone
on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm
obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around
that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the "Follies." The party has begun.
I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few
guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited — they went there.
They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow they
ended up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew
Gatsby and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior
associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having
met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own
ticket of admission.
I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin's egg blue
crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from
his employer — the honor would be entirely Gatsby's, it said, if I would attend his
"little party" that night. He had seen me several times and had intended to call on me
long before but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it — signed
Jay Gatsby in a majestic hand.
Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven and
wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn't know
— though here and there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was
immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well
dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and
prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or
insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money
in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three
people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and
denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the
direction of the cocktail table — the only place in the garden where a single man
could linger without looking purposeless and alone.
I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when Jordan
Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a
little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down into the garden.
Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone before I
should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.
"Hello!" I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud
across the garden.
"I thought you might be here," she responded absently as I came up. "I
remembered you lived next door to — "
She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she'd take care of me in a
minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses who stopped at the foot of
the steps.
"Hello!" they cried together. "Sorry you didn't win."
That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before.
"You don't know who we are," said one of the girls in yellow, "but we met
you here about a month ago."
 "You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jordan, and I started but the
girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon,
produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer's basket. With Jordan's slender
golden arm resting in mine we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden.
A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight and we sat down at a table with
the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble.
"Do you come to these parties often?" inquired Jordan of the girl beside her.
"The last one was the one I met you at," answered the girl, in an alert,
confident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you, Lucille?"
It was for Lucille, too.
"I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what I do, so I always have a good
time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name
and address — inside of a week I got a package from Croirier's with a new evening
gown in it."
"Did you keep it?" asked Jordan.
"Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and
had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five
dollars."
"There's something funny about a fellow that'll do a thing like that," said the
other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want any trouble with ANYbody."
"Who doesn't?" I inquired.
"Gatsby. Somebody told me — "
The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.
"Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once."
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and
listened eagerly.
"I don't think it's so much THAT," argued Lucille skeptically; "it's more that
he was a German spy during the war."
One of the men nodded in confirmation.
"I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in
Germany," he assured us positively.
"Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because he was in the
American army during the war." As our credulity switched back to her she leaned
forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody's
looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man."
She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and
looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired
that there were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary
to whisper about in this world.
The first supper — there would be another one after midnight — was now
being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party who were spread around a
table on the other side of the garden. There were three married couples and Jordan's
escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo and obviously under the
impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a
greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling this party had preserved a dignified
homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of
the countryside — East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard
against its spectroscopic gayety.
"Let's get out," whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate
half hour. "This is much too polite for me."
We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host — I had
never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The undergraduate nodded
in a cynical, melancholy way.
The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded but Gatsby was not there. She
couldn't find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn't on the veranda. On a
chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library,
panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some
ruin overseas.
A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles was sitting
somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at
the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined
Jordan from head to foot.
"What do you think?" he demanded impetuously.
"About what?"
He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
"About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I ascertained.
They're real."
"The books?"
He nodded.
"Absolutely real — have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice
durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages and — Here!
Lemme show you."
Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned
with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures."
"See!" he cried triumphantly. "It's a bona fide piece of printed matter. It
fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What
realism! Knew when to stop too — didn't cut the pages. But what do you want?
What do you expect?"
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf muttering
that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
"Who brought you?" he demanded. "Or did you just come? I was brought.
Most people were brought."
Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully without answering.
"I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt," he continued. "Mrs. Claud
Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I've been drunk for
about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library."
"Has it?"
"A little bit, I think. I can't tell yet. I've only been here an hour. Did I tell you
about the books? They're real. They're — "
"You told us."
We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.
 There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing young
girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other
tortuously, fashionably and keeping in the corners — and a great number of single
girls dancing individualistically or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the
burden of the banjo or the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A
celebrated tenor had sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and
between the numbers people were doing "stunts" all over the garden, while happy
vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage "twins" —
who turned out to be the girls in yellow — did a baby act in costume and
champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls. The moon had risen
higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to
the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.
I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about
my age and a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to
uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of
champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant,
elemental and profound.
At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.
"Your face is familiar," he said, politely. "Weren't you in the Third Division
during the war?"
"Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion."
"I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I'd seen
you somewhere before."
We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France.
Evidently he lived in this vicinity for he told me that he had just bought a
hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning.
"Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound."
"What time?"
"Any time that suits you best."
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around
and smiled.
"Having a gay time now?" she inquired.
"Much better." I turned again to my new acquaintance. "This is an unusual
party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there — " I waved my hand at
the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur
with an invitation."
For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.
"I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly.
"What!" I exclaimed. "Oh, I beg your pardon."
"I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host."
He smiled understandingly — much more than understandingly. It was one of
those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come
across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external
world for an instant, and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in
your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in
you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the
impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it
vanished — and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over
thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time
before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his
words with care.
Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler hurried
toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He
excused himself with a small bow that included each of us in turn.
"If you want anything just ask for it, old sport," he urged me. "Excuse me. I
will rejoin you later."
When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan — constrained to assure
her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent
person in his middle years.
"Who is he?" I demanded. "Do you know?"
"He's just a man named Gatsby."
"Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?"
"Now YOU're started on the subject," she answered with a wan smile. "Well,
— he told me once he was an Oxford man."
A dim background started to take shape behind him but at her next remark it
faded away.
"However, I don't believe it."
"Why not?"
"I don't know," she insisted, "I just don't think he went there."
Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl's "I think he killed a
man," and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would have accepted without
question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from
the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn't
— at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn't — drift coolly out of
nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.
"Anyhow he gives large parties," said Jordan, changing the subject with an
urbane distaste for the concrete. "And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At
small parties there isn't any privacy."
There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang
out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried. "At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going
to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work which attracted so much attention
at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big
sensation." He smiled with jovial condescension and added "Some sensation!"
whereupon everybody laughed.
"The piece is known," he concluded lustily, "as 'Vladimir Tostoff's Jazz
History of the World.' "
The nature of Mr. Tostoff's composition eluded me, because just as it began
my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one
group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight
on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could
see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking
helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct
as the fraternal hilarity increased. When the "Jazz History of the World" was over
girls were putting their heads on men's shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls
were swooning backward playfully into men's arms, even into groups knowing that
some one would arrest their falls — but no one swooned backward on Gatsby and
no French bob touched Gatsby's shoulder and no singing quartets were formed with
Gatsby's head for one link.
"I beg your pardon."
Gatsby's butler was suddenly standing beside us.
"Miss Baker?" he inquired. "I beg your pardon but Mr. Gatsby would like to
speak to you alone."
"With me?" she exclaimed in surprise.
"Yes, madame."
She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed
the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her
dresses, like sports clothes — there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she
had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.
I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and intriguing
sounds had issued from a long many-windowed room which overhung the terrace.
Eluding Jordan's undergraduate who was now engaged in an obstetrical
conversation with two chorus girls, and who implored me to join him, I went inside.
The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the
piano and beside her stood a tall, red haired young lady from a famous chorus,
engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of champagne and during the course of
her song she had decided ineptly that everything was very very sad — she was not
only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she
filled it with gasping broken sobs and then took up the lyric again in a quavering
soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks — not freely, however, for when they
came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color,
and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was
made that she sing the notes on her face whereupon she threw up her hands, sank
into a chair and went off into a deep vinous sleep.
"She had a fight with a man who says he's her husband," explained a girl at
my elbow.
I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with
men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan's party, the quartet from East Egg, were
rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a
young actress, and his wife after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified
and indifferent way broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks — at intervals
she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed "You
promised!" into his ear.
The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at
present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives. The
wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised voices.
"Whenever he sees I'm having a good time he wants to go home."
"Never heard anything so selfish in my life."
 "We're always the first ones to leave."
"So are we."
"Well, we're almost the last tonight," said one of the men sheepishly. "The
orchestra left half an hour ago."
In spite of the wives' agreement that such malevolence was beyond
credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted kicking
into the night.
As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and Jordan
Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to her but the
eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into formality as several people
approached him to say goodbye.
Jordan's party were calling impatiently to her from the porch but she lingered
for a moment to shake hands.
"I've just heard the most amazing thing," she whispered. "How long were we
in there?"
"Why, — about an hour."
"It was — simply amazing," she repeated abstractedly. "But I swore I
wouldn't tell it and here I am tantalizing you." She yawned gracefully in my face.
"Please come and see me. . . . Phone book. . . . Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney
Howard. . . My aunt. . . ." She was hurrying off as she talked — her brown hand
waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.
Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the
last of Gatsby's guests who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that I'd
hunted for him early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in
the garden.
"Don't mention it," he enjoined me eagerly. "Don't give it another thought, old
sport." The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which
reassuringly brushed my shoulder. "And don't forget we're going up in the
hydroplane tomorrow morning at nine o'clock."
Then the butler, behind his shoulder:
"Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir."
"All right, in a minute. Tell them I'll be right there. . . . good night."
"Good night."
"Good night." He smiled — and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant
significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it all the time.
"Good night, old sport. . . . Good night."
But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over.
Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous
scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side up but violently shorn of one wheel,
rested a new coupé which had left Gatsby's drive not two minutes before. The sharp
jut of a wall accounted for the detachment of the wheel which was now getting
considerable attention from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they had
left their cars blocking the road a harsh discordant din from those in the rear had
been audible for some time and added to the already violent confusion of the scene.
 A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in the
middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire and from the tire to the observers
in a pleasant, puzzled way.
"See!" he explained. "It went in the ditch."
The fact was infinitely astonishing to him — and I recognized first the
unusual quality of wonder and then the man — it was the late patron of Gatsby's
library.
"How'd it happen?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I know nothing whatever about mechanics," he said decisively.
"But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?"
"Don't ask me," said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter. "I
know very little about driving — next to nothing. It happened, and that's all I know."
"Well, if you're a poor driver you oughtn't to try driving at night."
"But I wasn't even trying," he explained indignantly, "I wasn't even trying."
An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.
"Do you want to commit suicide?"
"You're lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even TRYing!"
"You don't understand," explained the criminal. "I wasn't driving. There's
another man in the car."

The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained "Ah-h-h!"
as the door of the coupé swung slowly open. The crowd — it was now a crowd —
stepped back involuntarily and when the door had opened wide there was a ghostly
pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale dangling individual stepped out of
the wreck, pawing tentatively at the ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe.
Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant groaning
of the horns the apparition stood swaying for a moment before he perceived the man
in the duster.
"Wha's matter?" he inquired calmly. "Did we run outa gas?"
"Look!"
Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel — he stared at it for a
moment and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from
the sky.
"It came off," some one explained.
He nodded.
"At first I din' notice we'd stopped."
A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders he
remarked in a determined voice:
"Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?"
At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, explained to
him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond.
"Back out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse."
"But the WHEEL'S off!"
He hesitated.
"No harm in trying," he said.
 The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut
across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining
over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as before and surviving the laughter and
the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from
the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the
host who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.
Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the impression that
the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the
contrary they were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later,
they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.
Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow
westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity
Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names and
lunched with them in dark crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed
potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and
worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in
my direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away.
I took dinner usually at the Yale Club — for some reason it was the gloomiest
event of my day — and then I went upstairs to the library and studied investments
and securities for a conscientious hour. There were generally a few rioters around
but they never came into the library so it was a good place to work. After that, if the
night was mellow I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel
and over Thirty-third Street to the Pennsylvania Station.
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the
satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the
restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the
crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no
one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to
their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at
me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted
metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others —
poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a
solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant
moments of night and life.
Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with
throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms
leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter
from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside.
Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate
excitement, I wished them well.
For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her
again. At first I was flattered to go places with her because she was a golf champion
and every one knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn't actually in
love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to
the world concealed something — most affectations conceal something eventually,
even though they don't in the beginning — and one day I found what it was. When
we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the
rain with the top down, and then lied about it — and suddenly I remembered the
story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy's. At her first big golf
tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers — a suggestion that
she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached
the proportions of a scandal — then died away. A caddy retracted his statement and
the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and
the name had remained together in my mind.
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that
this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would
be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being
at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in
subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile
turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body.
It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never
blame deeply — I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house
party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she
passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man's coat.

"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful or

you oughtn't to drive at all."
"I am careful."
"No, you're not."
"Well, other people are," she said lightly.
"What's that got to do with it?"
"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an accident."
"Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself."
"I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why I like
you."
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately
shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking
and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had
to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a
week and signing them: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that
certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.
Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off
before I was free.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is
mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

Assignment 3
1. Read Chapters IV and V.