The Great Gatsby | Page 3

on that slender riotous island which extends itself
due east of New York and where there are, among other
natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty
miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in
contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into
the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western
Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.
They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus
story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but
their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual
confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a
more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every
particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the
two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi-
zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My
house was at the very tip of the egg, only fi?fy yards from the
Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented
for twelve or fi?feen thousand a season. The one on my right
was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi-
tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on
one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a
marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn
and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or rather, as I didn’t
know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle-
man of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it
was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a

The Great Gatsby

view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and
the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol-
lars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable
East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the
summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to
have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second
cousin once removed and I’d known Tom in college. And
just a?fer 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 a?ferward savors of anti-cli-
max. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college
his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but
now he’d le?f Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather
took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a
string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to real-
ize 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 dri?fed here
and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were
rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over
the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into
Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would dri?f on forever seek-
ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some
irrecoverable football game.

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And so it happened that on a