The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1
I n 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 any one,” he told me, “just
remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the ad-
vantages 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 in-
clined 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 lev-
ity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate
revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revel-
ations of young men, or at least the terms in which they ex-
press them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious sup-
pressions. 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
4
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 gor-
geous 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 re-
sponsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionab-
ility which is dignified under the name of the “creative tem-
perament.”— 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 temporar-
ily 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 descen-
ded 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 to-day.
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 centre 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 busi-
ness. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I sup-
posed 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, hesit-
ant 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.
5
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 card-
board 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 con-
ferred 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 Maecenas 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 be-
come again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-roun-
ded man.” This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more suc-
cessfully 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 curios-
ities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the
city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and
6
separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domest-
icated 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 over-
head. 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
Hotel 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 re-
moved, 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
7
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 tele-
phone, 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 estab-
lished 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 impres-
sion of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of pa-
ternal 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
8
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 to-
ward 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 win-
dows 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 exten-
ded 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 dis-
turbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise — she leaned
slightly forward with a conscientious expression — then she
9
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 al-
most 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 apo-
logy 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 fol-
lows 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 passion-
ate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men
who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing com-
pulsion, 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 per-
sistent wail all night along the north shore.”
“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. To-morrow!” 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 ——”
10
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 damned fool to live anywhere else.”
At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such sud-
denness that I started — it was the first word she 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 move-
ments 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 ca-
det. 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.”
11
“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”
Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was an-
nounced; 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 ex-
pression 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 chat-
ter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their imperson-
al 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.
12
“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 ut-
terly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expres-
sion 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 fe-
rociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California —” began Miss Baker, but
Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you
are, and ——” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included
Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “— And
we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization — oh,
science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his
complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him
any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang in-
side and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the mo-
mentary interruption and leaned toward me.
“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically.
“It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the
butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over to-night.”
“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver pol-
isher for some people in New York that had a silver service for
13
two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till
night, until finally it began to affect his nose ——”
“Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Miss Baker.
“Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to
give up his position.”
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection
upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward
breathlessly as I listened — then the glow faded, each light
deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a
pleasant street at dusk.
The butler came back and murmured something close to
Tom’s ear, whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair,
and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened
something within her, Daisy leaned forward again, her voice
glowing and singing.
“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a — of
a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss
Baker for confirmation: “An absolute rose?”
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was
only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as
if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of
those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her
napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the
house.
Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously
devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up
alertly and said “Sh!” in a warning voice. A subdued impas-
sioned murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss
Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur
trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted ex-
citedly, and then ceased altogether.
“This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor ——” I said.
“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”
“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.
“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Baker, honestly
surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”
“I don’t.”
“Why ——” she said hesitantly, “Tom’s got some woman in
New York.”
“Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.
14
Miss Baker nodded.
“She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner
time. Don’t you think?”
Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flut-
ter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and
Daisy were back at the table.
“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with tense gaiety.
She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at
me, and continued: “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s
very romantic outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think
must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star
Line. He’s singing away ——” Her voice sang: “It’s romantic,
isn’t it, Tom?”
“Very romantic,” he said, and then miserably to me: “If it’s
light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the
stables.”
The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook
her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all
subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the
last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit
again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look
squarely at every one, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t
guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even
Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy
scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill
metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the
situation might have seemed intriguing — my own instinct was
to telephone immediately for the police.
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom
and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them,
strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly
tangible body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a
little deaf, I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting veran-
das to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by
side on a wicker settee.
Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape,
and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw
that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I
thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.
15
“We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” she said sud-
denly. “Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my
wedding.”
“I wasn’t back from the war.”
“That’s true.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time,
Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.”
Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn’t say
any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the
subject of her daughter.
“I suppose she talks, and — eats, and everything.”
“Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Nick; let me
tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to
hear?”
“Very much.”
“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about — things. Well,
she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where.
I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling,
and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She
told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept.
‘all right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool
— that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful
little fool.”
“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on
in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so — the most advanced
people. And I KNOW. I’ve been everywhere and seen
everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed around her
in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrill-
ing scorn. “Sophisticated — God, I’m sophisticated!”
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my atten-
tion, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.
It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a
trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I
waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with
an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her
membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which
she and Tom belonged.
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light.
Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and
she read aloud to him from the SATURDAY EVENING POST.—
the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a
16
soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on
the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as
she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her
arms.
When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lif-
ted hand.
“To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the
table, “in our very next issue.”
Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her
knee, and she stood up.
“Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the time on
the ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”
“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament to-morrow,” ex-
plained Daisy, “over at Westchester.”
“Oh — you’re Jordan BAKER.”
I knew now why her face was familiar — its pleasing con-
temptuous expression had looked out at me from many roto-
gravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot
Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a
critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long
ago.
“Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”
“If you’ll get up.”
“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”
“Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy. “In fact I think I’ll ar-
range a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of — oh
— fling you together. You know — lock you up accidentally in
linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort
of thing ——”
“Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs. “I haven’t
heard a word.”
“She’s a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment. “They oughtn’t
to let her run around the country this way.”
“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.
“Her family.”
“Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides,
Nick’s going to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to
spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the
home influence will be very good for her.”
Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.
17