The Great Gatsby | Page 6

that sofa
for as long as I can remember.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Daisy retorted. ‘I’ve been trying to get
you to New York all a?fernoon.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in
from the pantry, ‘I’m absolutely in training.’
Her host looked at her incredulously.
‘You are!’ He took down his drink as if it were a drop in
the bottom of a glass. ‘How you ever get anything done is
beyond me.’
I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she ‘got
done.’ I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-

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breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated
by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young
cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with
polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discon-
tented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a
picture of her, somewhere before.
‘You live in West Egg,’ she remarked contemptuously. ‘I
know somebody there.’
‘I don’t know a single——‘
‘You must know Gatsby.’
‘Gatsby?’ demanded Daisy. ‘What Gatsby?’
Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner
was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively un-
der mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as
though he were moving a checker to another square.
Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips
the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored
porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered
on the table in the diminished wind.
‘Why CANDLES?’ objected Daisy, frowning. She
snapped them out with her fingers. ‘In two weeks it’ll be the
longest day in the year.’ She looked at us all radiantly. ‘Do
you always watch for the longest day of the year and then
miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and
then miss it.’
‘We ought to plan something,’ yawned Miss Baker, sit-
ting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.
‘All right,’ said Daisy. ‘What’ll we plan?’ She turned to
me helplessly. ‘What do people plan?’

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Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed ex-
pression on her little finger.
‘Look!’ she complained. ‘I hurt it.’
We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.
‘You did it, Tom,’ she said accusingly. ‘I know you didn’t
mean to but you DID do it. That’s what I get for marrying
a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of
a——‘
‘I hate that word hulking,’ objected Tom crossly, ‘even in
kidding.’
‘Hulking,’ insisted Daisy.
Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtru-
sively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never
quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and
their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were
here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a po-
lite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They
knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later
the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was
sharply different from the West where an evening was hur-
ried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually
disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of
the moment itself.
‘You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,’ I confessed on my
second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. ‘Can’t
you talk about crops or something?’
I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was
taken up in an unexpected way.
‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently.

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‘I’ve