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When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o'clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner I saw that it was Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar.

At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved itself into "hide-and-go-seek" or "sardines-in-the-box" with all the house thrown open to the game. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind in the trees which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on again as if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.

"Your place looks like the world's fair," I said.

"Does it?" He turned his eyes toward it absently. "I have been glancing into some of the rooms. Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car."

"It's too late."

"Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming pool? I haven't made use of it all summer."

"I've got to go to bed."

"All right."

He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness.

"I talked with Miss Baker," I said after a moment. "I'm going to call up Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea."

"Oh, that's all right," he said carelessly. "I don't want to put you to any trouble."

"What day would suit you?"

"What day would suit you?" he corrected me quickly. "I don't want to put you to any trouble, you see."

"How about the day after tomorrow?" He considered for a moment. Then, with reluctance:

"I want to get the grass cut," he said.

We both looked at the grass—there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that he meant my grass.

"There's another little thing," he said uncertainly, and hesitated.

"Would you rather put it off for a few days?" I asked.

"Oh, it isn't about that. At least—" He fumbled with a series of beginnings. "Why, I thought—why, look here, old sport, you don't make much money, do you?"

"Not very much."

This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.

"I thought you didn't, if you'll pardon my—you see, I carry on a little business on the side, a sort of sideline, you understand. And I thought that if you don't make very much—You're selling bonds, aren't you, old sport?"

"Trying to."

"Well, this would interest you. It wouldn't take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing."

I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there.

"I've got my hands full," I said. "I'm much obliged but I couldn't take on any more work."

"You wouldn't have to do any business with Wolfshiem." Evidently he thought that I was shying away from the "gonnegtion" mentioned at lunch, but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I'd begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive, so he went unwillingly home.

The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a deep sleep as I entered my front door. So I didn't know whether or not Gatsby went to Coney Island or for how many hours he "glanced into rooms" while his house blazed gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the office next morning and invited her to come to tea.

"Don't bring Tom," I warned her.

"What?"

"Don't bring Tom."

"Who is 'Tom'?" she asked innocently.

The day agreed upon was pouring rain. At eleven o'clock a man in a raincoat dragging a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This reminded me that I had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back so I drove into West Egg Village to search for her among soggy white-washed alleys and to buy some cups and lemons and flowers.

The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o'clock a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby's, with innumerable receptacles to contain it. An hour later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby in a white flannel suit, silver shirt and gold-colored tie hurried in. He was pale and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.

"Is everything all right?" he asked immediately.

"The grass looks fine, if that's what you mean."

"What grass?" he inquired blankly. "Oh, the grass in the yard." He looked out the window at it, but judging from his expression I don't believe he saw a thing.

"Looks very good," he remarked vaguely. "One of the papers said they thought the rain would stop about four. I think it was 'The Journal.' Have you got everything you need in the shape of—of tea?"

I took him into the pantry where he looked a little reproachfully at the Finn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen shop.

"Will they do?" I asked.

"Of course, of course! They're fine!" and he added hollowly, ". . .old sport."

The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist through which occasional thin drops swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyes through a copy of Clay's "Economics," starting at the Finnish tread that shook the kitchen floor and peering toward the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside. Finally he got up and informed me in an uncertain voice that he was going home.

"Why's that?"

"Nobody's coming to tea. It's too late!" He looked at his watch as if there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. "I can't wait all day."

"Don't be silly; it's just two minutes to four."

He sat down, miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously there was the sound of a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped up and, a little harrowed myself, I went out into the yard.

Under the dripping bare lilac trees a large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped sideways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic smile.

"Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?"

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car.

"Are you in love with me," she said low in my ear. "Or why did I have to come alone?"

"That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far away and spend an hour."

"Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur, "His name is Ferdie."

"Does the gasoline affect his nose?"

"I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?"

We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living room was deserted.

"Well, that's funny!" I exclaimed.

"What's funny?"

She turned her head as there was a light, dignified knocking at the front door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.

With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the hall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire and disappeared into the living room. It wasn't a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my own heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain.

For half a minute there wasn't a sound. Then from the living room I heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh followed by Daisy's voice on a clear artificial note.

"I certainly am awfully glad to see you again."

A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall so I went into the room.

Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock and from this position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy who was sitting frightened but graceful on the edge of a stiff chair.

"We've met before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at me and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand.

"I'm sorry about the clock," he said.

My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I couldn't muster up a single commonplace out of the thousand in my head.

"It's an old clock," I told them idiotically.

I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor.

"We haven't met for many years," said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.

"Five years next November."

The automatic quality of Gatsby's answer set us all back at least another minute. I had them both on their feet with the desperate suggestion that they help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac Finn brought it in on a tray.

Amid the welcome confusion of cups and cakes a certain physical decency established itself. Gatsby got himself into a shadow and, while Daisy and I talked, looked conscientiously from one to the other of us with tense unhappy eyes. However, as calmness wasn't an end in itself I made an excuse at the first possible moment and got to my feet.

"Where are you going?" demanded Gatsby in immediate alarm.

"I'll be back."

"I've got to speak to you about something before you go."

He followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the door and whispered: "Oh, God!" in a miserable way.

"What's the matter?"

"This is a terrible mistake," he said, shaking his head from side to side, "a terrible, terrible mistake."

"You're just embarrassed, that's all," and luckily I added: "Daisy's embarrassed too."

"She's embarrassed?" he repeated incredulously.

"Just as much as you are."

"Don't talk so loud."

"You're acting like a little boy," I broke out impatiently. "Not only that but you're rude. Daisy's sitting in there all alone."

He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable reproach and opening the door cautiously went back into the other room.

I walked out the back way—just as Gatsby had when he had made his nervous circuit of the house half an hour before—and ran for a huge black knotted tree whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain. Once more it was pouring and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by Gatsby's gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric marshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the "period" craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family—he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

After half an hour the sun shone again and the grocer's automobile rounded Gatsby's drive with the raw material for his servants' dinner—I felt sure he wouldn't eat a spoonful. A maid began opening the upper windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each, and, leaning from a large central bay, spat meditatively into the garden. It was time I went back. While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little, now and then, with gusts of emotion. But in the new silence I felt that silence had fallen within the house too.

I went in—after making every possible noise in the kitchen short of pushing over the stove—but I don't believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch looking at each other as if some question had been asked or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.

"Oh, hello, old sport," he said, as if he hadn't seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.

"It's stopped raining."

"Has it?" When he realized what I was talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to Daisy. "What do you think of that? It's stopped raining."

"I'm glad, Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.

"I want you and Daisy to come over to my house," he said, "I'd like to show her around."

"You're sure you want me to come?"

"Absolutely, old sport."

Daisy went upstairs to wash her face—too late I thought with humiliation of my towels—while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.

"My house looks well, doesn't it?" he demanded. "See how the whole front of it catches the light."

I agreed that it was splendid.

"Yes." His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. "It took me just three years to earn the money that bought it."

"I thought you inherited your money."

"I did, old sport," he said automatically, "but I lost most of it in the big panic—the panic of the war."

I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what business he was in he answered "That's my affair," before he realized that it wasn't the appropriate reply.

"Oh, I've been in several things," he corrected himself. "I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either one now." He looked at me with more attention. "Do you mean you've been thinking over what I proposed the other night?"

Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.

"That huge place there?" she cried pointing.

"Do you like it?"

"I love it, but I don't see how you live there all alone."

"I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people."

Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down the road and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees.

And inside as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music rooms and Restoration salons I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of "the Merton College Library" I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.

We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths—intruding into one chamber where a dishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the "boarder." I had seen him wandering hungrily about the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby's own apartment, a bedroom and a bath and an Adam study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall.

He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.

His bedroom was the simplest room of all—except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with delight and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his eyes and began to laugh.

"It's the funniest thing, old sport," he said hilariously. "I can't—when I try to—"

He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.

"I've got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall."

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before."

After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming pool, and the hydroplane and the midsummer flowers—but outside Gatsby's window it began to rain again so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound.

"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock."

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I began to walk about the room, examining various indefinite objects in the half darkness. A large photograph of an elderly man in yachting costume attracted me, hung on the wall over his desk.

"Who's this?"

"That? That's Mr. Dan Cody, old sport."

The name sounded faintly familiar.

"He's dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago."

There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting costume, on the bureau—Gatsby with his head thrown back defiantly—taken apparently when he was about eighteen.

"I adore it!" exclaimed Daisy. "The pompadour! You never told me you had a pompadour—or a yacht."

"Look at this," said Gatsby quickly. "Here's a lot of clippings—about you."

They stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask to see the rubies when the phone rang and Gatsby took up the receiver.

"Yes. . . . Well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, old sport. . . . I said a small town. . . . He must know what a small town is. . . . Well, he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town. . . ."

He rang off.

"Come here quick!" cried Daisy at the window.

The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.

"Look at that," she whispered, and then after a moment: "I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around."

I tried to go then, but they wouldn't hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.

"I know what we'll do," said Gatsby, "we'll have Klipspringer play the piano."

He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blonde hair. He was now decently clothed in a "sport shirt" open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of a nebulous hue.

"Did we interrupt your exercises?" inquired Daisy politely.

"I was asleep," cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment. "That is, I'd been asleep. Then I got up. . . ."

"Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby, cutting him off. "Don't you, Ewing, old sport?"

"I don't play well. I don't—I hardly play at all. I'm all out of prac—"

"We'll go downstairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.

In the music room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy's cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.

When Klipspringer had played "The Love Nest" he turned around on the bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.

"I'm all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all out of prac—"

"Don't talk so much, old sport," commanded Gatsby. "Play!"

In the morning,
In the evening,
  Ain't we got fun—

Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.

One thing's sure and nothing's surer
The rich get richer and the poor get—children.
   In the meantime,
  In between time—

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most with its fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn't be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.

When I came home to West Egg that night, I was afraid for a second that my house was on fire. It was 2 o’clock, and the entire corner of the peninsula was blazing with light. Turning the corner, I saw that Gatsby’s house was lit up from top to bottom.

At first I thought he was having a party, but it was completely quiet. The only sound was the wind in the trees, which blew the wires and made the lights go on and off as if the house was winking. As my taxi drove away, I saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.

“Your place looks like the world’s fair," I said.

“Does it?” He turned back to look, seeming distracted. “I’ve been looking into some of the rooms. Let’s get in my car and go to Coney Island, old sport.”

“It’s too late,” I replied.

“Maybe we could take a plunge in my swimming pool? I haven’t used it all summer.”

“I've got to go to bed.”

“All right.”

He waited, looking at me and clearly trying to hide his eagerness. Realizing what he wanted to ask about, I said, “I talked with Miss Baker. I’m going to call Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here for tea.”

 

“Oh, OK,” he said, as if he didn’t care. “I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“What day works best for you?”

“What days works best for you?” he asked earnestly. “Because I don’t want to bother you, you know.”

“How about the day after tomorrow?”

He considered it for a moment. Then he said reluctantly, “I want to get the grass cut first.”

We both looked at the grass—there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and his well-kept lawn began.

“There’s one more little thing,” he said uncertainly, then hesitated.

“Would you rather put it off a few days?” I asked.

“Oh, it isn’t about that. It’s--” He fumbled for the right words. “I thought, well—look, old sport, you don’t make a lot of money, do you?”

“No, not really.”

My answer seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.

“I thought you didn’t, and I have a little business on the side, a sort of side hustle, you know? And I thought that, since you don’t make very much, maybe… You're selling bonds, aren’t you, old sport?”

“I’m trying to,” I replied.

“Well, this might interest you. It wouldn’t take up too much of your time and you might make some good money. But it’s a confidential sort of thing.”

I realize now that under different circumstances, that conversation might have led to me making a terrible mistake. But it was obvious that Gatsby was clumsily trying to pay me for setting up this visit with Daisy, so I had to cut him off right there.

“I’ve got my hands full,” I told him. “Thank you for the offer, but I don’t have time to do any more work.”

“You wouldn’t have to do any business with Wolfshiem,” he reassured me. He clearly thought I was put off by what Wolfshiem had mentioned at lunch, but I assured him that he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I’d change my mind, and when I didn’t, he went home reluctantly.

The evening with Jordan had made me light-headed and happy, and I fell asleep almost instantly. I don’t know whether Gatsby actually went to Coney Island, or for how many hours he “looked into rooms” while the house stayed brightly lit. I called Daisy from the office the next morning and invited her to come to tea.

“Don’t bring Tom,” I warned her.

“Who’s ‘Tom’?” she joked.

The day she came over, it was pouring rain. At 11 o’clock, a man in a raincoat dragging a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. I drove into West Egg village to ask my Finnish housekeeper to come back, and to buy some cups,lemons, and flowers.

It turned out that the flowers were unnecessary, because at 2 o’clock, enough flowers to fill a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby’s. An hour later, Gatsby nervously opened my front door and hurried in, wearing a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie. He was pale and had dark circles under his eyes.  

“Is everything all right?” he asked immediately.

“The grass looks fine, if that’s what you mean,” I answered.

“What grass?” he asked distractedly. “Oh, you mean the grass in the yard.” He looked out the window at it, but judging from his expression, he didn’t see a thing.

“Looks very good,” he remarked vaguely. “One of the papers said they thought the rain would stop around four. I think it was the Journal. Have you got everything you need for tea?”

I took him into my pantry, where he gave my housekeeper a disappointed look. Together we looked over the twelve lemon cakes I’d bought from the bakery.

“Will they work?” I asked.

“Of course, of course! They’re fine, old sport!”

By 3:30, the rain had slowed to a damp mist. Gatsby looked distractedly through an economics book, jumping every time my housekeeper walked around, and peering toward my blurry windows every now and then, as if a series of invisible but alarming events were taking place outside. Finally, he got up and informed me in an uncertain voice that he was going home.

“Why?” I asked.

“Nobody’s coming to tea. It’s too late!” He looked at his watch as if he had somewhere else to be. “I can’t wait all day.”

“Don’t be silly, it only two minutes to four,” I reassured him. 

He sat down miserably, as if I had pushed him, and at the exact same moment there was the sound of a car turning into my lane. We both jumped up, and, feeling a little nervous, I went out into the yard.

Under the dripping lilac trees, a large car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy’s face, tipped sideways underneath a lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright, ecstatic smile.

“Is this really where you live, my dearest one?”

The exhilarating sound of her voice rippled through the rain. A damp streak of her hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops when I took it to help her from the car.

“Are you in love with me?” she joked into my ear. “Why did I have to come alone?”

“That’s the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go away for an hour.”

“Come back in an hour, Ferdie,” she told him. Then she murmured, “His name is Ferdie.”

“Does the gasoline affect his nose?” I asked, jokingly referring to a conversation we’d once had about her butler’s nose.

“I don’t think so,” she replied innocently. “Why?”

We went in, and I was surprised to see that my living room was deserted.

“Well, that’s strange!” I exclaimed.

“What’s strange?”

Then there was a light, dignified knock at the front door. I went to the door and opened it to find Gatsby standing there, as pale as a corpse, with his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, glaring sadly into my eyes.

With his hands still in his pockets, he walked past me into the hall, turned sharply, and disappeared into the living room. Aware of the loud beating of my own heart, I pulled the door closed against the increasing rain.

For half a minute there wasn’t a sound. Then from the living room I heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh, followed by Daisy’s voice, clear and unnatural.

“I’m so glad to see you again.”

There was a long, painful pause. I had nothing to do in the hall, so I went into the room.

Gatsby, with his hands still in his pockets, was leaning against the mantle of my fireplace, clearly pretending to be relaxed, or even bored. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a broken clock, and from this position, his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy, who was sitting, nervous but graceful, on the edge of a stiff chair.

“We’ve met before,” muttered Gatsby. He glanced at me for a moment and his lips parted, like he was going to laugh. Luckily, the clock tilted under his head and started to fall off the mantle, but he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and put it back. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand.

“I’m sorry about the clock,” he said.

My own face was now bright red. I couldn’t think of a single response out of the thousand in my head.

“It’s an old clock,” I told them idiotically.

For a moment I think we all believed it had smashed to pieces on the floor.

“We haven’t met for many years,” said Daisy, matter-of-factly.

“Five years next November,” replied Gatsby.

This instant answer, as if he had counted the days of their separation, silenced us all for at least another minute. Out of desperation, I suggested that they help me make tea in the kitchen, but then my demon of a housekeeper brought it in.

With the distraction of tea and cakes,  everyone shuffled around politely. While Daisy and I talked, Gatsby stood to the side and, watched us with tense, unhappy eyes. Since silence wasn’t exactly what I was aiming for, I made an excuse at the first possible moment and got to my feet.

“Where are you going?” demanded Gatsby with alarm.

“I’ll be back,” I replied.

“I have to talk to you about something before you go.”

He followed me frantically into the kitchen, closed the door, and whispered “Oh, God!” in a miserable way.

“What's the matter?" I asked.

“This is a terrible, terrible mistake,” he said, shaking his head from side to side, “a terrible, terrible mistake.”

“You’re just embarrassed, that’s all,” and then I added, “Daisy’s embarrassed too.”

“She’s embarrassed?” he repeated in disbelief.

“Just as much as you are.”

“Don’t talk so loud.”

“You’re acting like a little boy,” I said impatiently. “Not only that but you’re being rude. Daisy’s sitting in there all alone.”

He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable disapproval, and opened the door cautiously before going back into the other room.

I walked out the back way—just as Gatsby had when he made his nervous circuit of the house half an hour before—and ran for a huge, black, knotted tree whose thick leaves made a canopy against the rain. It was pouring again and my lawn, well-trimmed by Gatsby’s gardener, was filled with muddy swamps. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it for half an hour. The original owner had built it a decade before, and there was a rumor that he’d agreed to pay five years’ taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners agreed to have their roofs thatched with straw. Maybe their refusal wounded him—his health immediately began to fail. His children sold his house with a black mourning wreath still on the door.

After half an hour, the sun shone again, and the grocer’s car came down Gatsby’s drive with food for his servants’ dinner. A maid began opening the upper windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each one, and leaning from a large central bay, spat into the garden. It was time for me to go back in. While the rain continued it had sounded like the murmur of voices, getting louder every now and then with gusts of emotion. But in the new silence, I felt that silence had fallen within the house too.  

After making every possible noise in the kitchen short of pushing over the stove, I went back into the living room—but I don't believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if there was a question in the air, and neither seemed embarrassed anymore. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears, and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping it with her handkerchief in front of a mirror. The change that had taken place in Gatsby was astonishing. He literally glowed: a new sense of well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.

“Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment that he might stand up and shake my hand.

“It stopped raining,” I said.

“Has it?” When he realized that there were twinkling rays of sunshine in the room, he smiled ecstatically and repeated the news to Daisy: “What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining.”

“I’m glad, Jay.” Her voice, though it sounded like it ached with grief,  expressed her unexpected joy.

“I want you and Daisy to come over to my house, he said. "I’d like to show her around.”

“Are you sure you want me to come?” I asked.

“Absolutely, old sport.”

Daisy went upstairs to wash her face—as soon as she left the room, I remembered the humiliating condition of my shabby towels—while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.

“My house looks good, doesn’t it?" he demanded. “Look how the whole front of it catches the light.”

I agreed that it was wonderful.

“Yes.” His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. “It only took me three years to earn the money to buy it.”

“I thought you inherited your money.”

“I did, old sport,” he said automatically, “but I lost most of it during the big panic of the war.”

I think he was hardly aware of what he was saying, because when I asked him what business he was in, he answered “That’s private,” before he realized that it wasn’t an appropriate reply.

“Oh, I’ve done several things,” he corrected himself. “I was in the pharmaceutical business and the oil business. But I’m not doing either of those now.” He looked at me closely. “Does this mean you’ve been thinking over my offer from the other night?”

Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house, and the brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.

“Your house is that huge place there?” she cried, pointing.

“Do you like it?”

“I love it, but I don’t understand how you can live there all alone.”

“I always keep it full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Famous people.”

Instead of taking the shortcut to Gatsby’s, we went down the road and entered by the big side door. With enchanting murmurs, Daisy admired the house’s silhouette, the gardens, and its flowers. It was strange to reach the marble steps to Gatsby’s house  and see no bright dresses coming in and out, to hear no sounds except the birds in the trees.

Inside, as we wandered through lavish music rooms and salons, I had the weird feeling that guests were hidden  under every couch and table, ordered to be silent until we had left. As Gatsby closed the door to “the Merton College Library,” I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.

We went upstairs, through bedrooms draped in silk and vivid with fresh flowers, through dressing rooms, poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths, including one room where a disheveled man in pajamas was doing exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the “boarder” who treated Gatsby’s house like his own. I had seen him wandering the beach that morning. Finally we arrived at Gatsby’s private rooms, which included a bedroom and a bath and a study, where we sat down and drank some wine he took from a cupboard in the wall.

He hadn’t stopped looking at Daisy the entire time, and I think he reconsidered the value of everything in his house according to the response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as if Daisy’s actual and astounding presence meant that none of it was real. Once he was so distracted that he nearly fell down a flight of stairs.

His bedroom was the simplest room in the entire mansion—except where a toiletry kit made of pure, dull gold sat on his dresser. Daisy picked up the brush with delight and smoothed her hair, and Gatsby sat down and covered his eyes and began to laugh.

“It’s the funniest thing, old sport,“ he said hilariously. “I can’t—when I try to—”

I had watched him pass through two emotional states, and here was a third. His initial embarrassment was followed by unrestrained joy, and now he was filled with wonder at Daisy’s presence. He had dreamt of their reunion for so long, and waited for it so desperately, that now that it was finally happening, he seemed to be breaking down like an overwound clock.

After he regained his composure, he opened two massive cabinets that held his suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, which were piled like bricks and stacked a dozen high.

“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each spring and fall.”

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, into the air, shirts made of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel that covered the table in a colorful mess. While Daisy and I admired them, he brought more and the soft, rich, colorful heap grew even higher. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head over the shirts and began to cry.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick fabric. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”

We’d planned to go outside to see the grounds around Gatsby’s house, but it began to rain again, so we stood in a row looking at the surface of the Sound.

“If it wasn’t for the mist, we could see your home across the bay,” Gatsby told Daisy. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

Daisy suddenly put her arm through his, but he seemed distracted by what he had just said. Maybe he realized that the light wasn’t so important anymore. When he was so far separated from Daisy, the green light had seemed like it was close enough to touch her, like a star to the moon. Now, it just a green light on a dock, and no longer an enchanted object.

I began to walk around the room, looking at various objects in the half darkness. On the wall behind his desk, I noticed a large photograph of an elderly man in yachting clothes.

“Who's this?“ I asked Gatsby.

“That? That’s Mr. Dan Cody, old sport. " he answered.

The name sounded faintly familiar to me.

“He’s dead now,” Gatsby continued. He was my best friend years ago.”

There was a small photo of Gatsby, also dressed in yachting clothes, on the nightstand. He looked about 18, and he had his head thrown back defiantly.

 “I adore it!” exclaimed Daisy. “That hairstyle! You never told me you used to wear your hair like that—or that you had a yacht.”

“Look at this,” said Gatsby quickly. ”Here’s a lot of newspaper clippings—about you.”

They stood side by side examining them until the phone rang and Gatsby answered it.

“Yes. . . . Well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, old sport. . . . I said a small town. . . . He must know what a small town is. . . . Well, he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town. . . ."

He hung up.

“Come here quick!” cried Daisy, who was now standing in front of the window.

The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of clouds above the sea.

“Look at that,” she whispered, and then after a moment, she added: “I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”

I tried to go then, to leave them alone, but they wouldn’t let me. Maybe my presence made them more comfortable.

“I know what we’ll do, “ said Gatsby, ”we’ll have Klipspringer play the piano.”

He went out of the room calling “Ewing!” and returned a few minutes later with the embarrassed young man we’d seen earlier. He was now wearing shell-rimmed glasses and was decently dressed in a shirt, sneakers, and colorful trousers.

“Did we interrupt your exercises?” inquired Daisy politely.

“I was asleep,” cried Mr. Klipspringer, seeming embarrassed. “That is, I’d been asleep. Then I got up. . .”

“Klipspringer plays the piano,” Gatsby said, cutting him off. “Don’t you, Ewing, old sport?”

"I don't play well. I don't—I hardly play at all. I'm all out of prac—"

"We'll go downstairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The gray windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.

In the music room, Gatsby turned on a single lamp beside the piano. His hand trembled as he lit Daisy’s cigarette, and he sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where the only light was the glow that bounced off the gleaming floor.

Klipspringer played “The Love Nest,” and then turned around on the piano bench and said unhappily, "I'm all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all out of prac—"

“Don’t talk so much, old sport!” commanded Gatsby. “Play!”

In the morning,
In the evening,
  Ain't we got fun—

Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint sound of thunder. All the lights were going on in West Egg now and men were commuting home from New York in the rain in this hour of exciting change.

One thing's sure and nothing's surer
The rich get richer and the poor get—children.
   In the meantime,
  In between time—

As I went over to say goodbye, I saw that Gatsby looked confused again, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him about his current happiness. He had been waiting for Daisy for almost five years! There must have been things about her that fell short of his expectations, just because of how perfect her image was in his mind. It was so much bigger than her. Nothing can match the fantasy that a man builds in his own heart.

I watched as he adjusted his face back to normal. He took Daisy’s hand, and her low whisper in his ear made him very emotional. I think her voice was so captivating because it was one thing his memory hadn’t overblown.

They had forgotten me. Daisy glanced up and held out her hand, but Gatsby seemed not to know me. Their eyes looked possessed by intense life. I left the room and went down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.

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Original

Modern

When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o'clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner I saw that it was Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar.

At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved itself into "hide-and-go-seek" or "sardines-in-the-box" with all the house thrown open to the game. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind in the trees which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on again as if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.

"Your place looks like the world's fair," I said.

"Does it?" He turned his eyes toward it absently. "I have been glancing into some of the rooms. Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car."

"It's too late."

"Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming pool? I haven't made use of it all summer."

"I've got to go to bed."

"All right."

He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness.

"I talked with Miss Baker," I said after a moment. "I'm going to call up Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea."

"Oh, that's all right," he said carelessly. "I don't want to put you to any trouble."

"What day would suit you?"

"What day would suit you?" he corrected me quickly. "I don't want to put you to any trouble, you see."

"How about the day after tomorrow?" He considered for a moment. Then, with reluctance:

"I want to get the grass cut," he said.

We both looked at the grass—there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that he meant my grass.

"There's another little thing," he said uncertainly, and hesitated.

"Would you rather put it off for a few days?" I asked.

"Oh, it isn't about that. At least—" He fumbled with a series of beginnings. "Why, I thought—why, look here, old sport, you don't make much money, do you?"

"Not very much."

This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.

"I thought you didn't, if you'll pardon my—you see, I carry on a little business on the side, a sort of sideline, you understand. And I thought that if you don't make very much—You're selling bonds, aren't you, old sport?"

"Trying to."

"Well, this would interest you. It wouldn't take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing."

I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there.

"I've got my hands full," I said. "I'm much obliged but I couldn't take on any more work."

"You wouldn't have to do any business with Wolfshiem." Evidently he thought that I was shying away from the "gonnegtion" mentioned at lunch, but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I'd begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive, so he went unwillingly home.

The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a deep sleep as I entered my front door. So I didn't know whether or not Gatsby went to Coney Island or for how many hours he "glanced into rooms" while his house blazed gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the office next morning and invited her to come to tea.

"Don't bring Tom," I warned her.

"What?"

"Don't bring Tom."

"Who is 'Tom'?" she asked innocently.

The day agreed upon was pouring rain. At eleven o'clock a man in a raincoat dragging a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This reminded me that I had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back so I drove into West Egg Village to search for her among soggy white-washed alleys and to buy some cups and lemons and flowers.

The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o'clock a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby's, with innumerable receptacles to contain it. An hour later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby in a white flannel suit, silver shirt and gold-colored tie hurried in. He was pale and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.

"Is everything all right?" he asked immediately.

"The grass looks fine, if that's what you mean."

"What grass?" he inquired blankly. "Oh, the grass in the yard." He looked out the window at it, but judging from his expression I don't believe he saw a thing.

"Looks very good," he remarked vaguely. "One of the papers said they thought the rain would stop about four. I think it was 'The Journal.' Have you got everything you need in the shape of—of tea?"

I took him into the pantry where he looked a little reproachfully at the Finn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen shop.

"Will they do?" I asked.

"Of course, of course! They're fine!" and he added hollowly, ". . .old sport."

The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist through which occasional thin drops swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyes through a copy of Clay's "Economics," starting at the Finnish tread that shook the kitchen floor and peering toward the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside. Finally he got up and informed me in an uncertain voice that he was going home.

"Why's that?"

"Nobody's coming to tea. It's too late!" He looked at his watch as if there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. "I can't wait all day."

"Don't be silly; it's just two minutes to four."

He sat down, miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously there was the sound of a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped up and, a little harrowed myself, I went out into the yard.

Under the dripping bare lilac trees a large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped sideways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic smile.

"Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?"

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car.

"Are you in love with me," she said low in my ear. "Or why did I have to come alone?"

"That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far away and spend an hour."

"Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur, "His name is Ferdie."

"Does the gasoline affect his nose?"

"I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?"

We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living room was deserted.

"Well, that's funny!" I exclaimed.

"What's funny?"

She turned her head as there was a light, dignified knocking at the front door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.

With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the hall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire and disappeared into the living room. It wasn't a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my own heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain.

For half a minute there wasn't a sound. Then from the living room I heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh followed by Daisy's voice on a clear artificial note.

"I certainly am awfully glad to see you again."

A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall so I went into the room.

Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock and from this position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy who was sitting frightened but graceful on the edge of a stiff chair.

"We've met before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at me and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand.

"I'm sorry about the clock," he said.

My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I couldn't muster up a single commonplace out of the thousand in my head.

"It's an old clock," I told them idiotically.

I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor.

"We haven't met for many years," said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.

"Five years next November."

The automatic quality of Gatsby's answer set us all back at least another minute. I had them both on their feet with the desperate suggestion that they help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac Finn brought it in on a tray.

Amid the welcome confusion of cups and cakes a certain physical decency established itself. Gatsby got himself into a shadow and, while Daisy and I talked, looked conscientiously from one to the other of us with tense unhappy eyes. However, as calmness wasn't an end in itself I made an excuse at the first possible moment and got to my feet.

"Where are you going?" demanded Gatsby in immediate alarm.

"I'll be back."

"I've got to speak to you about something before you go."

He followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the door and whispered: "Oh, God!" in a miserable way.

"What's the matter?"

"This is a terrible mistake," he said, shaking his head from side to side, "a terrible, terrible mistake."

"You're just embarrassed, that's all," and luckily I added: "Daisy's embarrassed too."

"She's embarrassed?" he repeated incredulously.

"Just as much as you are."

"Don't talk so loud."

"You're acting like a little boy," I broke out impatiently. "Not only that but you're rude. Daisy's sitting in there all alone."

He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable reproach and opening the door cautiously went back into the other room.

I walked out the back way—just as Gatsby had when he had made his nervous circuit of the house half an hour before—and ran for a huge black knotted tree whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain. Once more it was pouring and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by Gatsby's gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric marshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the "period" craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family—he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

After half an hour the sun shone again and the grocer's automobile rounded Gatsby's drive with the raw material for his servants' dinner—I felt sure he wouldn't eat a spoonful. A maid began opening the upper windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each, and, leaning from a large central bay, spat meditatively into the garden. It was time I went back. While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little, now and then, with gusts of emotion. But in the new silence I felt that silence had fallen within the house too.

I went in—after making every possible noise in the kitchen short of pushing over the stove—but I don't believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch looking at each other as if some question had been asked or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.

"Oh, hello, old sport," he said, as if he hadn't seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.

"It's stopped raining."

"Has it?" When he realized what I was talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to Daisy. "What do you think of that? It's stopped raining."

"I'm glad, Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.

"I want you and Daisy to come over to my house," he said, "I'd like to show her around."

"You're sure you want me to come?"

"Absolutely, old sport."

Daisy went upstairs to wash her face—too late I thought with humiliation of my towels—while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.

"My house looks well, doesn't it?" he demanded. "See how the whole front of it catches the light."

I agreed that it was splendid.

"Yes." His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. "It took me just three years to earn the money that bought it."

"I thought you inherited your money."

"I did, old sport," he said automatically, "but I lost most of it in the big panic—the panic of the war."

I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what business he was in he answered "That's my affair," before he realized that it wasn't the appropriate reply.

"Oh, I've been in several things," he corrected himself. "I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either one now." He looked at me with more attention. "Do you mean you've been thinking over what I proposed the other night?"

Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.

"That huge place there?" she cried pointing.

"Do you like it?"

"I love it, but I don't see how you live there all alone."

"I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people."

Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down the road and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees.

And inside as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music rooms and Restoration salons I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of "the Merton College Library" I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.

We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths—intruding into one chamber where a dishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the "boarder." I had seen him wandering hungrily about the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby's own apartment, a bedroom and a bath and an Adam study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall.

He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.

His bedroom was the simplest room of all—except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with delight and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his eyes and began to laugh.

"It's the funniest thing, old sport," he said hilariously. "I can't—when I try to—"

He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.

"I've got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall."

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before."

After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming pool, and the hydroplane and the midsummer flowers—but outside Gatsby's window it began to rain again so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound.

"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock."

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I began to walk about the room, examining various indefinite objects in the half darkness. A large photograph of an elderly man in yachting costume attracted me, hung on the wall over his desk.

"Who's this?"

"That? That's Mr. Dan Cody, old sport."

The name sounded faintly familiar.

"He's dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago."

There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting costume, on the bureau—Gatsby with his head thrown back defiantly—taken apparently when he was about eighteen.

"I adore it!" exclaimed Daisy. "The pompadour! You never told me you had a pompadour—or a yacht."

"Look at this," said Gatsby quickly. "Here's a lot of clippings—about you."

They stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask to see the rubies when the phone rang and Gatsby took up the receiver.

"Yes. . . . Well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, old sport. . . . I said a small town. . . . He must know what a small town is. . . . Well, he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town. . . ."

He rang off.

"Come here quick!" cried Daisy at the window.

The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.

"Look at that," she whispered, and then after a moment: "I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around."

I tried to go then, but they wouldn't hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.

"I know what we'll do," said Gatsby, "we'll have Klipspringer play the piano."

He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blonde hair. He was now decently clothed in a "sport shirt" open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of a nebulous hue.

"Did we interrupt your exercises?" inquired Daisy politely.

"I was asleep," cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment. "That is, I'd been asleep. Then I got up. . . ."

"Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby, cutting him off. "Don't you, Ewing, old sport?"

"I don't play well. I don't—I hardly play at all. I'm all out of prac—"

"We'll go downstairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.

In the music room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy's cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.

When Klipspringer had played "The Love Nest" he turned around on the bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.

"I'm all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all out of prac—"

"Don't talk so much, old sport," commanded Gatsby. "Play!"

In the morning,
In the evening,
  Ain't we got fun—

Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.

One thing's sure and nothing's surer
The rich get richer and the poor get—children.
   In the meantime,
  In between time—

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most with its fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn't be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.

When I came home to West Egg that night, I was afraid for a second that my house was on fire. It was 2 o’clock, and the entire corner of the peninsula was blazing with light. Turning the corner, I saw that Gatsby’s house was lit up from top to bottom.

At first I thought he was having a party, but it was completely quiet. The only sound was the wind in the trees, which blew the wires and made the lights go on and off as if the house was winking. As my taxi drove away, I saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.

“Your place looks like the world’s fair," I said.

“Does it?” He turned back to look, seeming distracted. “I’ve been looking into some of the rooms. Let’s get in my car and go to Coney Island, old sport.”

“It’s too late,” I replied.

“Maybe we could take a plunge in my swimming pool? I haven’t used it all summer.”

“I've got to go to bed.”

“All right.”

He waited, looking at me and clearly trying to hide his eagerness. Realizing what he wanted to ask about, I said, “I talked with Miss Baker. I’m going to call Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here for tea.”

 

“Oh, OK,” he said, as if he didn’t care. “I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“What day works best for you?”

“What days works best for you?” he asked earnestly. “Because I don’t want to bother you, you know.”

“How about the day after tomorrow?”

He considered it for a moment. Then he said reluctantly, “I want to get the grass cut first.”

We both looked at the grass—there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and his well-kept lawn began.

“There’s one more little thing,” he said uncertainly, then hesitated.

“Would you rather put it off a few days?” I asked.

“Oh, it isn’t about that. It’s--” He fumbled for the right words. “I thought, well—look, old sport, you don’t make a lot of money, do you?”

“No, not really.”

My answer seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.

“I thought you didn’t, and I have a little business on the side, a sort of side hustle, you know? And I thought that, since you don’t make very much, maybe… You're selling bonds, aren’t you, old sport?”

“I’m trying to,” I replied.

“Well, this might interest you. It wouldn’t take up too much of your time and you might make some good money. But it’s a confidential sort of thing.”

I realize now that under different circumstances, that conversation might have led to me making a terrible mistake. But it was obvious that Gatsby was clumsily trying to pay me for setting up this visit with Daisy, so I had to cut him off right there.

“I’ve got my hands full,” I told him. “Thank you for the offer, but I don’t have time to do any more work.”

“You wouldn’t have to do any business with Wolfshiem,” he reassured me. He clearly thought I was put off by what Wolfshiem had mentioned at lunch, but I assured him that he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I’d change my mind, and when I didn’t, he went home reluctantly.

The evening with Jordan had made me light-headed and happy, and I fell asleep almost instantly. I don’t know whether Gatsby actually went to Coney Island, or for how many hours he “looked into rooms” while the house stayed brightly lit. I called Daisy from the office the next morning and invited her to come to tea.

“Don’t bring Tom,” I warned her.

“Who’s ‘Tom’?” she joked.

The day she came over, it was pouring rain. At 11 o’clock, a man in a raincoat dragging a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. I drove into West Egg village to ask my Finnish housekeeper to come back, and to buy some cups,lemons, and flowers.

It turned out that the flowers were unnecessary, because at 2 o’clock, enough flowers to fill a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby’s. An hour later, Gatsby nervously opened my front door and hurried in, wearing a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie. He was pale and had dark circles under his eyes.  

“Is everything all right?” he asked immediately.

“The grass looks fine, if that’s what you mean,” I answered.

“What grass?” he asked distractedly. “Oh, you mean the grass in the yard.” He looked out the window at it, but judging from his expression, he didn’t see a thing.

“Looks very good,” he remarked vaguely. “One of the papers said they thought the rain would stop around four. I think it was the Journal. Have you got everything you need for tea?”

I took him into my pantry, where he gave my housekeeper a disappointed look. Together we looked over the twelve lemon cakes I’d bought from the bakery.

“Will they work?” I asked.

“Of course, of course! They’re fine, old sport!”

By 3:30, the rain had slowed to a damp mist. Gatsby looked distractedly through an economics book, jumping every time my housekeeper walked around, and peering toward my blurry windows every now and then, as if a series of invisible but alarming events were taking place outside. Finally, he got up and informed me in an uncertain voice that he was going home.

“Why?” I asked.

“Nobody’s coming to tea. It’s too late!” He looked at his watch as if he had somewhere else to be. “I can’t wait all day.”

“Don’t be silly, it only two minutes to four,” I reassured him. 

He sat down miserably, as if I had pushed him, and at the exact same moment there was the sound of a car turning into my lane. We both jumped up, and, feeling a little nervous, I went out into the yard.

Under the dripping lilac trees, a large car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy’s face, tipped sideways underneath a lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright, ecstatic smile.

“Is this really where you live, my dearest one?”

The exhilarating sound of her voice rippled through the rain. A damp streak of her hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops when I took it to help her from the car.

“Are you in love with me?” she joked into my ear. “Why did I have to come alone?”

“That’s the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go away for an hour.”

“Come back in an hour, Ferdie,” she told him. Then she murmured, “His name is Ferdie.”

“Does the gasoline affect his nose?” I asked, jokingly referring to a conversation we’d once had about her butler’s nose.

“I don’t think so,” she replied innocently. “Why?”

We went in, and I was surprised to see that my living room was deserted.

“Well, that’s strange!” I exclaimed.

“What’s strange?”

Then there was a light, dignified knock at the front door. I went to the door and opened it to find Gatsby standing there, as pale as a corpse, with his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, glaring sadly into my eyes.

With his hands still in his pockets, he walked past me into the hall, turned sharply, and disappeared into the living room. Aware of the loud beating of my own heart, I pulled the door closed against the increasing rain.

For half a minute there wasn’t a sound. Then from the living room I heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh, followed by Daisy’s voice, clear and unnatural.

“I’m so glad to see you again.”

There was a long, painful pause. I had nothing to do in the hall, so I went into the room.

Gatsby, with his hands still in his pockets, was leaning against the mantle of my fireplace, clearly pretending to be relaxed, or even bored. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a broken clock, and from this position, his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy, who was sitting, nervous but graceful, on the edge of a stiff chair.

“We’ve met before,” muttered Gatsby. He glanced at me for a moment and his lips parted, like he was going to laugh. Luckily, the clock tilted under his head and started to fall off the mantle, but he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and put it back. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand.

“I’m sorry about the clock,” he said.

My own face was now bright red. I couldn’t think of a single response out of the thousand in my head.

“It’s an old clock,” I told them idiotically.

For a moment I think we all believed it had smashed to pieces on the floor.

“We haven’t met for many years,” said Daisy, matter-of-factly.

“Five years next November,” replied Gatsby.

This instant answer, as if he had counted the days of their separation, silenced us all for at least another minute. Out of desperation, I suggested that they help me make tea in the kitchen, but then my demon of a housekeeper brought it in.

With the distraction of tea and cakes,  everyone shuffled around politely. While Daisy and I talked, Gatsby stood to the side and, watched us with tense, unhappy eyes. Since silence wasn’t exactly what I was aiming for, I made an excuse at the first possible moment and got to my feet.

“Where are you going?” demanded Gatsby with alarm.

“I’ll be back,” I replied.

“I have to talk to you about something before you go.”

He followed me frantically into the kitchen, closed the door, and whispered “Oh, God!” in a miserable way.

“What's the matter?" I asked.

“This is a terrible, terrible mistake,” he said, shaking his head from side to side, “a terrible, terrible mistake.”

“You’re just embarrassed, that’s all,” and then I added, “Daisy’s embarrassed too.”

“She’s embarrassed?” he repeated in disbelief.

“Just as much as you are.”

“Don’t talk so loud.”

“You’re acting like a little boy,” I said impatiently. “Not only that but you’re being rude. Daisy’s sitting in there all alone.”

He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable disapproval, and opened the door cautiously before going back into the other room.

I walked out the back way—just as Gatsby had when he made his nervous circuit of the house half an hour before—and ran for a huge, black, knotted tree whose thick leaves made a canopy against the rain. It was pouring again and my lawn, well-trimmed by Gatsby’s gardener, was filled with muddy swamps. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it for half an hour. The original owner had built it a decade before, and there was a rumor that he’d agreed to pay five years’ taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners agreed to have their roofs thatched with straw. Maybe their refusal wounded him—his health immediately began to fail. His children sold his house with a black mourning wreath still on the door.

After half an hour, the sun shone again, and the grocer’s car came down Gatsby’s drive with food for his servants’ dinner. A maid began opening the upper windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each one, and leaning from a large central bay, spat into the garden. It was time for me to go back in. While the rain continued it had sounded like the murmur of voices, getting louder every now and then with gusts of emotion. But in the new silence, I felt that silence had fallen within the house too.  

After making every possible noise in the kitchen short of pushing over the stove, I went back into the living room—but I don't believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if there was a question in the air, and neither seemed embarrassed anymore. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears, and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping it with her handkerchief in front of a mirror. The change that had taken place in Gatsby was astonishing. He literally glowed: a new sense of well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.

“Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment that he might stand up and shake my hand.

“It stopped raining,” I said.

“Has it?” When he realized that there were twinkling rays of sunshine in the room, he smiled ecstatically and repeated the news to Daisy: “What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining.”

“I’m glad, Jay.” Her voice, though it sounded like it ached with grief,  expressed her unexpected joy.

“I want you and Daisy to come over to my house, he said. "I’d like to show her around.”

“Are you sure you want me to come?” I asked.

“Absolutely, old sport.”

Daisy went upstairs to wash her face—as soon as she left the room, I remembered the humiliating condition of my shabby towels—while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.

“My house looks good, doesn’t it?" he demanded. “Look how the whole front of it catches the light.”

I agreed that it was wonderful.

“Yes.” His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. “It only took me three years to earn the money to buy it.”

“I thought you inherited your money.”

“I did, old sport,” he said automatically, “but I lost most of it during the big panic of the war.”

I think he was hardly aware of what he was saying, because when I asked him what business he was in, he answered “That’s private,” before he realized that it wasn’t an appropriate reply.

“Oh, I’ve done several things,” he corrected himself. “I was in the pharmaceutical business and the oil business. But I’m not doing either of those now.” He looked at me closely. “Does this mean you’ve been thinking over my offer from the other night?”

Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house, and the brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.

“Your house is that huge place there?” she cried, pointing.

“Do you like it?”

“I love it, but I don’t understand how you can live there all alone.”

“I always keep it full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Famous people.”

Instead of taking the shortcut to Gatsby’s, we went down the road and entered by the big side door. With enchanting murmurs, Daisy admired the house’s silhouette, the gardens, and its flowers. It was strange to reach the marble steps to Gatsby’s house  and see no bright dresses coming in and out, to hear no sounds except the birds in the trees.

Inside, as we wandered through lavish music rooms and salons, I had the weird feeling that guests were hidden  under every couch and table, ordered to be silent until we had left. As Gatsby closed the door to “the Merton College Library,” I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.

We went upstairs, through bedrooms draped in silk and vivid with fresh flowers, through dressing rooms, poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths, including one room where a disheveled man in pajamas was doing exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the “boarder” who treated Gatsby’s house like his own. I had seen him wandering the beach that morning. Finally we arrived at Gatsby’s private rooms, which included a bedroom and a bath and a study, where we sat down and drank some wine he took from a cupboard in the wall.

He hadn’t stopped looking at Daisy the entire time, and I think he reconsidered the value of everything in his house according to the response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as if Daisy’s actual and astounding presence meant that none of it was real. Once he was so distracted that he nearly fell down a flight of stairs.

His bedroom was the simplest room in the entire mansion—except where a toiletry kit made of pure, dull gold sat on his dresser. Daisy picked up the brush with delight and smoothed her hair, and Gatsby sat down and covered his eyes and began to laugh.

“It’s the funniest thing, old sport,“ he said hilariously. “I can’t—when I try to—”

I had watched him pass through two emotional states, and here was a third. His initial embarrassment was followed by unrestrained joy, and now he was filled with wonder at Daisy’s presence. He had dreamt of their reunion for so long, and waited for it so desperately, that now that it was finally happening, he seemed to be breaking down like an overwound clock.

After he regained his composure, he opened two massive cabinets that held his suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, which were piled like bricks and stacked a dozen high.

“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each spring and fall.”

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, into the air, shirts made of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel that covered the table in a colorful mess. While Daisy and I admired them, he brought more and the soft, rich, colorful heap grew even higher. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head over the shirts and began to cry.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick fabric. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”

We’d planned to go outside to see the grounds around Gatsby’s house, but it began to rain again, so we stood in a row looking at the surface of the Sound.

“If it wasn’t for the mist, we could see your home across the bay,” Gatsby told Daisy. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

Daisy suddenly put her arm through his, but he seemed distracted by what he had just said. Maybe he realized that the light wasn’t so important anymore. When he was so far separated from Daisy, the green light had seemed like it was close enough to touch her, like a star to the moon. Now, it just a green light on a dock, and no longer an enchanted object.

I began to walk around the room, looking at various objects in the half darkness. On the wall behind his desk, I noticed a large photograph of an elderly man in yachting clothes.

“Who's this?“ I asked Gatsby.

“That? That’s Mr. Dan Cody, old sport. " he answered.

The name sounded faintly familiar to me.

“He’s dead now,” Gatsby continued. He was my best friend years ago.”

There was a small photo of Gatsby, also dressed in yachting clothes, on the nightstand. He looked about 18, and he had his head thrown back defiantly.

 “I adore it!” exclaimed Daisy. “That hairstyle! You never told me you used to wear your hair like that—or that you had a yacht.”

“Look at this,” said Gatsby quickly. ”Here’s a lot of newspaper clippings—about you.”

They stood side by side examining them until the phone rang and Gatsby answered it.

“Yes. . . . Well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, old sport. . . . I said a small town. . . . He must know what a small town is. . . . Well, he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town. . . ."

He hung up.

“Come here quick!” cried Daisy, who was now standing in front of the window.

The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of clouds above the sea.

“Look at that,” she whispered, and then after a moment, she added: “I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”

I tried to go then, to leave them alone, but they wouldn’t let me. Maybe my presence made them more comfortable.

“I know what we’ll do, “ said Gatsby, ”we’ll have Klipspringer play the piano.”

He went out of the room calling “Ewing!” and returned a few minutes later with the embarrassed young man we’d seen earlier. He was now wearing shell-rimmed glasses and was decently dressed in a shirt, sneakers, and colorful trousers.

“Did we interrupt your exercises?” inquired Daisy politely.

“I was asleep,” cried Mr. Klipspringer, seeming embarrassed. “That is, I’d been asleep. Then I got up. . .”

“Klipspringer plays the piano,” Gatsby said, cutting him off. “Don’t you, Ewing, old sport?”

"I don't play well. I don't—I hardly play at all. I'm all out of prac—"

"We'll go downstairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The gray windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.

In the music room, Gatsby turned on a single lamp beside the piano. His hand trembled as he lit Daisy’s cigarette, and he sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where the only light was the glow that bounced off the gleaming floor.

Klipspringer played “The Love Nest,” and then turned around on the piano bench and said unhappily, "I'm all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all out of prac—"

“Don’t talk so much, old sport!” commanded Gatsby. “Play!”

In the morning,
In the evening,
  Ain't we got fun—

Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint sound of thunder. All the lights were going on in West Egg now and men were commuting home from New York in the rain in this hour of exciting change.

One thing's sure and nothing's surer
The rich get richer and the poor get—children.
   In the meantime,
  In between time—

As I went over to say goodbye, I saw that Gatsby looked confused again, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him about his current happiness. He had been waiting for Daisy for almost five years! There must have been things about her that fell short of his expectations, just because of how perfect her image was in his mind. It was so much bigger than her. Nothing can match the fantasy that a man builds in his own heart.

I watched as he adjusted his face back to normal. He took Daisy’s hand, and her low whisper in his ear made him very emotional. I think her voice was so captivating because it was one thing his memory hadn’t overblown.

They had forgotten me. Daisy glanced up and held out her hand, but Gatsby seemed not to know me. Their eyes looked possessed by intense life. I left the room and went down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.

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