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enha-woodzies · 3 years

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➸ CHAPTER 6 | " AT LONG LAST PT. 1 "

starring: enhypen ft. i-land daniel

pairing: jungwon x fem!reader x sunghoon

genres: royal au, romance, angst, slowburn, 18th century setting

word count: 2.5k

taglist: @serendipitysung (betareader) @angeljungwon @en-sun @affectionaterainoflove @renkiv @softforjungwoo @jislix @fluffi @gyeraniee @stxrryemxlys

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To be promenaded in front of the entire ton is one of every lady’s desires. From the piercing stares of the envious, to the love-struck looks of those smitten by the pair, the two most-loved couple of this season gracefully saunters from the cemented pathway and down to the grassy lawn, ever so politely greeting Northumberland with their warmest and charming presence.

The young marquess joins the young miss’ family under the canopy near the lake. With a hand draping over Sunghoon’s arm, Lord Niki mutters swears to the gods for lightning to strike upon the chap, as the gagging sight of his sister along with his most despised douche is gradually sucking the life out of him.

“Good morning!” Sunghoon greets the family and so did Lady Park. Jay gives away a polite nod followed by a toast of the teacup, whereas the almost always brooding Niki responds with an exaggerated rolling of his eyes.

“Your Grace. Always the charmer, aren't we?” Niki jeers to which Jay chokes on his warm, jasmine tea.

“The smoothest at being one, Riki.” The name rolls naturally off his tongue like a snake’s hiss that roused Niki’s ire. The boy could feel the crescendo of his spite, yet he eases it casually with a sly smirk.

“Smooth like a snake, perhaps? I anticipate those fangs in action.” Niki surprisingly snaps back. Jay clears his throat as he whispers to Niki in hopes to prevent him from further fumes, although he knows it would be of no use.

Sunghoon scoffs in return, “need I remind you that I shall deliver if provoked. However tempting that may be right now, I regret to inform you that I’m only here to promenade your sister and impress your dear mother.”

“I do hope she turns you down in the most painful way possible, Your Grace. I find my sister's taste in men quite genteel. Surely, you're aware of how opposed you are to that considering your…” Niki walks closer to the marquess to give an exclusive barb against his ear, “nasty record.” He brushes off imaginary dust off Sunghoon’s shoulder before bumping against it, “Good day to you two!”

“Oh dear, your brother is making me worried. Is he alright?” Lady Park whispers to Jay and the gent soothes their mother by softly massaging her hands, rubbing circles on the back of her palm, “he's just going through puberty, mother.”

“Is that so? I don't remember you having those episodes before. Furthermore, I apologize, Your Grace. Rest assured it won't happen again. I will definitely see to it.”

“No worries entirely. It's Niki after all, he may be a tough handful but as far as I recall he's completely-”

“Held back? Are those the words you were going for?” Jay cuts off.

“You're quite forgetting the fact that I’m right here.” Y/n attempts to intrude only to be silenced by her brother once again. With his head held high, Jay saunters up to Sunghoon, who is almost the same height as him. Locking eyes with the chap, he simpers, “come, Your Grace, I require a brief moment with you. Excuse us for a bit, sis.”

And with that, the men left the canopy, leaving Y/n and her mother utterly baffled with the uncalled tension.

The sound of paper being folded into an almost crumple echoes around the parlour, where the only sound that existed prior was deafening silence from the three men sitting across each other.

The culprit was none other than Yang Jungwon, who appears to be insulted from what he just read. Throwing off the now crumpled paper, Daniel perfectly catches it mid-air and opens it in haste.

Sunoo takes a gander at the Daily Tattle’s contents that Daniel incoherently mutters. Jungwon carefully studies his brother's reaction as Sunoo’s smile quickly transforms into shock, followed by the furrowing of his eyebrows with his mouth ajar; the final gesture, shooting a questioning look-- with his mouth still ajar-- at one of the scandal’s subjects.

“Surely, me asking two dances from you was already too cheap but, one, brother? Are you seriously being expensive right now?" The eldest exclaims.

"One that is very exclusive and controversial, might I add." Daniel chimes in. “What was all that about?"

"Remind me why I need to explain myself to the both of you?" Jungwon monotonously replies with his eyes fixed on the book he was now reading.

“Because we ought to know?”

“Well, if not to us, at least to Y/n?"

“Good god. Why is she in this conversation all of a sudden?"

"Because you pulled a dick move on her and we ought to know what's going on inside that brain of yours! You're so dense. Must we shake you up to shrug off those lil rust in there?"

"Oh, shut up, Daniel."

“That thing you did there? With her? Was very unlikely of you, Jungwon." Sunoo stands from his seat and transfers to Jungwon’s side on the couch.

"Well, what is like me then?"

"Spit it out or Daniel and I are gonna have to annoy you for the whole week.”

Jungwon slams the book on the couch and lets out an exasperated sigh before grunting out loud. "I just wanted to be alone with her, okay?! Are you pleased now?"

"Wait. You like her, don't you?”

“No, I don't! And I would never for heaven's sake."

“But you want to be alone with her. Isn't that what people do when they're in love?" Daniel rubs his chin in thought.

“Oh, god! Whatever lets the both of you sleep at night then. Assume the worst for all I care." The heated gent lifts himself up from the couch and strides towards the exit.

“Where are you going?”

“Away from the two of you. You won't stop annoying me either way, so I’m gonna get myself some cleaner air.” Jungwon slams the door shut behind him for a relieving walk to the woods.

“Now he's mad.”

“All we ever said was the truth, didn't we?”

“He is pretty rusty, alright.”

Y/n visits the Kielder Forest once again to run away from the stressful men of this morning’s promenade. She could've stayed in her fortress, but because of their foolish ruse, she had to show up. Now her brothers had to meddle with the already confusing mess.

Pages from the borrowed Austen book are now being flicked through again. She couldn't concentrate no matter how hard she tried, as Niki’s words still lingered in her mind.

“What nasty record could he have?” She mutters under her breath. Soon after, crunching of leaves startles her, and she realizes her whispers weren't the only noise around. Y/n dashes out of her sheer fort only to be welcomed by her most coveted man ever.

"What are you doing here?!" Jungwon asks in an angry kind of worry.

"What are you doing here?"

"Taking a walk, obviously?"

"Well, I’m reading. Obviously." Y/n sassily blinks at him, to which he returns a slightly puzzled look.

"You're much aware that you shouldn't be here, let alone unchaperoned, right?"

"Well, good thing you're here!"

Y/n crouches down to re enter her fort now that she has a guest. She softly taps the extra pillow, gesturing Jungwon to join her in a momentary bliss. One that is very rare when it comes to the both of them, and something that the young miss has found herself accustomed to now. When it comes to Jungwon, he'll just leave her begging for more.

Was it simply luck that had caused him to turn down this pathway? Whatever it was, he didn't feel the need to complain. As of now, all he ever wanted was a piece of mind from his brother's interrogations about him and Y/n. Not fully realizing that the very person who triggered him to rush out of his house would be the one he was impossibly hoping to run into.

"You still have that?" Jungwon points his lips to the book she was flipping. She had borrowed it from him and had yet to return it after all these years.

"Are the inclusions still there?" He continues. Although he wishes he didn't. He recalls all the little notes he left on his favorite pages just to get his feelings across and now he chuckles at the mere thought of him playing Romeo.

"They are. They're kind of tattered now, but they're still comprehensible. You do have a remarkable penmanship after all, something that's very impossible to miss."

The boy chuckles at the thought. "You do mean those things you wrote here, right?" She concerningly asks to which Jungwon only shrugs his shoulder with lips shut tight. "Well, don't mind me 'cause I'd like to think that you did."

"Suit yourself." He mutters. Little did she know he was smiling to himself with flushed cheeks.

The boy looks around the interior of the fort while whistling to the air, followed by a few jabberjays mocking his tune. They chuckle over the memory and realize they had traveled back in time.

"Jay's going to get aggressive with me on fencing once he hears about this. I've been conspiring to keep his sister hidden." He playfully smirks.

"Do you remember we used to do this in the garden lawn? Playing hide and seek just to get a glimpse of Jay's maddening face." Y/n reminisces the good old times they both used to share. Although there were petty fights here and there, what conquered most was their endearing bond.

Jungwon looks over as he vividly remembers that exact memory, "and we ended up building a fort out of the picnic sheets we used to hide in and officially made it our castle" he adds.

"I've forgotten what it's like to feel young." Y/n lets out a deep sigh, minding the pressure she's bearing now that she's about to be offered to the life-long commitment that is marriage.

Jungwon looks over her, feeling all concerned with the worries that she might be facing as of late; things that he wouldn't have any knowledge of as a man.

Society has dictated women's place in the world as persons who are supposed to be emotional, submissive, and homely; something very opposed to those of men. Knowing Y/n well enough and how she enjoys her liberty, her own principles, Jungwon worries her future companion, if not him, would find her very indifferent and of no use in the long run.

And it pains him to think that she wouldn't be well off with someone even worse than him.

She deserves more and he knows that fully well.

"Well, I, for one, miss moments like this more than anything." He lightens the mood in hopes of seeing that beautiful smile on her face.

As he turns to her, the two lock eyes. In that moment, Yang Jungwon swore of laying out his long-hidden sentiments. Under normal circumstances, he would speak his mind. But with Y/n looking at him like this, he would most likely fuck things up.

And he fails himself yet again.

"So uhh… you and the duke-to-be, huh? That must be thrilling." He looks away and pretends to play with the twigs on the ground.

"Y-Yeah! Yeah, indeed, it is. The promenade went well today… before the two decided to sabotage it."

"Do tell."

"We're all aware of how Niki ultimately detests the marquess, aren’t we? He kind of uhh… insulted the man in front of mother."

"And… Jay?"

"Stole the marquess from me to have a word with him."

"I reckon he had many words with him."

Y/n chagrins at the imagination of Jay going head to head with the marquess. Being the overprotective one, Jay will go out of his way to expel threats in the family.

"You seem to be clearly aware of that. Yet you entertained His Grace anyway. I pity Niki. He must be going through a loophole of shit again, now that his dear sister's off strutting with that man." Jungwon blurts out, though he wishes he never did… again.

He is clearly rusty and he kind of admits it now.

"That man? Whatever's the matter with all of you?! You dare speak of him like you know what happened between him and my brother-"

"Y/n, we all went to the same university. What makes you think I know nothing?"

"That man you're referring to was just the man who saved me from an embarrassing night, no thanks to you."

Jungwon scoffs at her pettiness.

"Don't turn away with those remarks now. You toyed with me that night, left me there with nothing but utter shame to bring home. I'm sure you're very proud of that now."

Promenading would be every woman's desire, indeed. But being ghosted or fled from is something that every woman fears, especially when they've been shunned by someone they adore the most. Such shame and reproach haunts them for almost the rest of their lives, especially when the ton won't let them sleep at night with that reminder.

"Have you not at least any bit of politeness left in you? You must be ashamed, asking my brother for such favor that you cannot even put through yourself."

"I have my reasons."

"I highly doubt they're even valid." Y/n retorts. Jungwon sighs in exasperation, finding the situation rather unnecessary that he'd rather keep his mouth shut. She deserves to let her anger out after all.

"Whatever happened to you?" She mutters under her breath, looking over to the boy who kept his head hung low with his elbows leaning on his raised knees. "Sometimes, I look at you and see a completely different person. You know, I never learned to read your mind, Jungwon. So stop giving me all these silent treatments as if something happened even though nothing ever did."

Jungwon lets out a sharp exhale before poking his cheek with his tongue. "Stop seeing Sunghoon then. If you care so much about your brother, stop frolicking around with that scoundrel."

Y/n scoffs at him, followed by the rolling of her eyes, trying to stifle an untimely tear from falling.

"You're unbelievable! Just so you know, I've wasted many sleepless nights crying because of your stupid ass, and I still do for heaven's sake! But now it's very clear to me that there's no amount of crying left that I can do for you!"

Y/n groans heavily before standing up from the pillow she was sitting on, throwing the Austen book hardly on the cold ground.

"So much for hearing nothing but the truth from you, huh? I despise you, Jung. Very much."

She runs off from the boy for what seemed like the nth time. For the past years, this exact scene had happened. Jungwon closes his eyes and lets himself fall harshly on the pillows. He raises a hand over his head, looking at the gaps between his fingers thinking of how he let her slip away, again. He drowns himself in deep thoughts, all the while trusting that Y/n will forget this day ever happened, like before.

He knows she will.

At least, that's what he tells himself.

Though deep down, his stomach churns in fear.

And there's no one to blame but his damning pride.

*send me an ask or a message if you wish to be added on this series' taglist!

ㅡ © ENHA-WOODZIES, 2021

#kpopscape #enhypenwriters #enhypennetwork #of lords and mischiefs #enhypen angst #enhypen fluff #enhypen imagines #enhypen series #enhypen fics #enhypen jungwon #enhypen sunghoon #enhypen heeseung #enhypen jay #enhypen jake #enhypen sunoo #enhypen niki #iland daniel

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liljakonvalj · 3 years

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I thought I'd start out with a brief summarization if the story. I plan to use this as a index of kind as well. (This is basically translated from the lyrics booklet because I'm not good at summarising).

Just a few notices: I've never actually seen this musical, despite having been in love with it for over 10 years, so if i get anything wrong please tell me :)

This will be based on the swedish version, and based around the official CD recording. Some songs are called different names in the CD and the musical, but I'll use the CD names here in the index and specify for each song if it does have a different name in the musical.

I'll use both the little booklet that came with the CDs and a booklet with the lyrics for audiences that was printed for the show when it was put up in Stockholm 1998.

Story act 1

We are in the 19th century and Nils has been spending the last 25 years struggling with removing rocks from his farm, Korpamoen in Småland, when one day a rock falls on him, shattering his hip and leg. He can no longer farm the land and his eldest son, Karl Oskar, who is barely of age, convinces him to sell him the farm. Karl Oskar knows having a farm is not a one man job and sets out to meet the person he has in mind (Prolog).

Kristina from Duvemåla sits on her swing and dreams of her beau, Karl Oskar. She sing about the road she knows him to walk towards her and their meeting place (Duvemåla hage). When Karl Oskar comes he tells her of his new investment and proposes to her. They wed at Duvemåla (Min lust till dig).

Karl Oskar's younger brother - Robert the dreamer - is sent off by his parents to serve as a farmhand at another, bigger, farm. During his walk to his new employer and home he stops by a brook and thinks that as the brook long for the ocean he longs for freedom in the New World (Ut mot ett hav).

The first two years go well for Kristina and Karl Oskar. But during the third year all crop is drowned in rain and the fourth year's crop is ruined by drought. It's hard to feed the growing family and Karl Oskar longs for a nation where wheat rises high on the fields, not like it is at home where he constantly has to struggle (Missväxt).

Robert comes to Karl Oskar and Kristina. His master has given him a hard beating and he wants to get his inheritance so he can leave for North America. Karl Oskar is happy to announce he too have gone with similar thoughts, but Kristina stops their plans (Nej).

Kristina's uncle Danjel holds a forbidden prayer congregation in his house (Lilla skara). They are found out by the authorities who forbid them from meeting anymore, and they forbid Danjel from preaching (Aldrig).

Food is scarce and everyone is hungry. Kristina has birthed a new baby and gathers ingredients for "christeningporridge". The eldest daughter Anna discover the porridge, however, and cannot resist eating it. Starved as she is her stomach cannot handle the abundance of food as it bloats her stomach and she dies. Kristina despairs- she cannot keep her children safe even on dry land, maybe her husband is right in that they'll fare better crossing the ocean? (Kom till mig alla)

Kristina is terrified of the journey, she's never even seen the sea before, but Karl Oskar only sees possibilities. Joining them is Danjel, his family, Ulrika the local prostitute, her illegimate daughter Elin and Arvid the farmhand (Vi öppnar alla grindar).

The trip is terrible (Bönder på havet). Kristina discover she has lice and wrongfully accuses Ulrika as the one to blame (Löss). There are horrible storms and Kristina gets very sick with scurvy. Karl Oskar despairs at her bedside, afraid of losing her (Stanna, Begravning till Sjöss).

At last the emigrants reach New York. There they see people in beautiful clothes who pays them no mind (A Sunday in Battery Park). They are given an apple and Kristina remineses over the apples at home (Hemma).

The journey continues by boat and train by many days and nights (Från New York till Stillwater). One rainy night they are left at a dock with nowhere to go, but the baptist pastor Jackson shows up and invites them all to his house. The women are amazed of how well he takes care of them, as well as a woman might (Tänk att män som han kan finnas).

They reach the lake Ki-Chi-Saga where Karl Oskar and Kristina intend to build their new home (Kamfer och lavendel). But Robert and Arvid wants to travel to California and the gold fields to find their fortune, despite Karl Oskar's reservations (Drömmen om guld). Kristina gives birth once more and tells her baby of how it won't get to experience her homeland (Min astrakan).

Act 2

Kristina seems to be alone in being homesick (Överheten) but Karl Oskar sees how she feels and show her Anna's shoes and they remind them both why they left Sweden (Ljusa kvällar om våren).

It's Christmas and Karl Oskar and the children surprise Kristina with a new iron cast stove (Präriens drottning). Guests arrive to celebrate the holiday but the party ends with a row between Karl Oskar and the trapper Nöjd about who really is the owner of the lands (Vildgräs).

Robert returns from the gold fields a broken man and tells Kristina of how he has come to grips with his destiny (Jag har förlikat mig till slut) and how he lost Arvid (Guldet blev till sand). The money Robert gave Karl Oskar turn out to be counterfeit and he becomes furious with his brother (Wild cat money). Hurt by his brothers words and sickly Robert leaves. He stops by a brook and lie down to die (Ut mot ett hav).

Ulrika has had many suitors (Vill du inte gifta dej med mej). But she tells Kristina (Ett Herrans underverk) that she has decided upon the pastor Jackson and that she'll become a baptist like him (Down to the sacred wave).

Kristina suffers a miscarriage and the doctor says if she falls pregnant again she'll die (Missfall). For the first time in her life Kristina feels her faith crumble with doubt. How can God take away her child, her native land and now her husband (Du måste finnas)? After some time (Skördefest) she overcomes her doubts and resolves to put her life in God's hands (Här har du mig igen). She falls pregnant once more (Red Iron/Kära Herre, hjälp mig trösta). The other settlers flee for their lives from the war that breaks loose (Var hör vi hemma?) But Karl Oskar and Kristina remain. They've sent for apple seeds from back home. During its fourth year the flowers manages to survive the frost and just as the fruit becomes ripe Kristina dies (I gott bevar).

#kristina från Duvemåla #kfd #swedish things #kfdsongs #plz blacklist kfdsongs if you do not want to see these posts from me #im very excuted about this #i dont think i can get a more condesed form of the story without excluding the inportant story points #i hope i did it justice

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cheese-greater-official · 3 years

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The Great Gatsby .. I think antibucci Summary: Literally just the great Gatsby. Nothing else here. Absolutely no changes. Definitely use this for class, or reference. The Great Gatsby is public domain now after all. Anyways here's the totally unaltered and complete book of the Great Gatsby. I swear nothing was changed, most definitely. Of course credit to F Scott Fitzgerald for writing this commentary on both his life and the world he was in. A lot of this can still relate today, so keep an open mind when reading. Notes: I'd like to preface this by saying... This is really I mean REALLY just the Great Gatsby. I swear. There is nothing going here that is out of the ordinary! Nothing at all! Chapter 1 Chapter Text Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!” - Thomas Parke D'Invilliers. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the

wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day. I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him — with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why — ye — es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog — at least I had him for a few days until he ran away — and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. “How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural 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 bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented

rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some 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 gentleman 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 view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month. Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago. Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that. Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body. His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. "Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own. We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch. "I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. Turning me around by one arm

he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore. "It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside." We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor. The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room. "I'm p-paralyzed with happiness." She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.) At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me. "Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically. "The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore." "How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby." "I'd like to." "She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?" "Never." "Well, you ought to see her. She's—" Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. "What you doing, Nick

?" "I'm a bond man." "Who with?" I told him. "Never heard of them," he remarked decisively. This annoyed me. "You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East." "Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else." At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room. "I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember." "Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon." "No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training." Her host looked at her incredulously. "You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me." I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before. "You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there." "I don't know a single—" "You must know Gatsby." "Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?" Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square. Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind. "Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed. "All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?" Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger. "Look!" she complained. "I hurt it." We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue. "You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—" "I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding." "Hulking," insisted Daisy. Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite 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 polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself. "You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?" I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way. "Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The

Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?" "Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone. "Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—" "Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things." "We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun. "You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair. "This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?" There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me. "I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" "That's why I came over tonight." "Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—" "Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker. "Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position." For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk. The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing. "I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?" This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house. Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether. "This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said. "Don't talk. I want to hear what happens." "Is something happening?" I inquired innocently. "You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew." "I don't." "Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York." "Got some woman?" I repeated blankly. Miss Baker nodded. "She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?" Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table. "It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety. She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked

outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?" "Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables." The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police. The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee. Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl. "We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding." "I wasn't back from the war." "That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything." Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. "I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything." "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?" "Very much." "It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." "You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!" The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday Evening Post"—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms. When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand. "To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table,

"in our very next issue." Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up. "Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed." "Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester." "Oh,—you're Jordan Baker." I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago. "Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you." "If you'll get up." "I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon." "Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—" "Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word." "She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way." "Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly. "Her family." "Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her." Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence. "Is she from New York?" I asked quickly. "From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—" "Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—" "Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me. I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called "Wait! "I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West." "That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you were engaged." "It's libel. I'm too poor." "But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We heard it from three people so it must be true." Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage. Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in

his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. Chapter 2 Summary: Just chapter 2 of the Great Gatsby Notes: (See the end of the chapter for notes.) Chapter Text About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. "We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl." I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred

to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. "Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?" "I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell me that car?" "Next week; I've got my man working on it now." "Works pretty slow, don't he?" "No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all." "I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant—" His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: "Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down." "Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. "I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train." "All right." "I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level." She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track. "Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. "Awful." "It does her good to get away." "Doesn't her husband object?" "Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive." So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. "I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to have—a dog." We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed. "What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. "All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?" "I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?" The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. "That's no police dog," said Tom. "No, it's not exactly a police dog,"

" said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with catching cold." "I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?" "That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten dollars." The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. "Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately. "That dog? That dog's a boy." "It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it." We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner. "Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here." "No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?" "Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know." "Well, I'd like to, but—" We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. "I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too." The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle" lay on the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed i

Feel free to delete the first one. I would do anything for you if post this. The Great Gatsby in all it’s glory

im aware i was probably supposed to read the whole thing to find out if you changed anything and tnhen find out you hadnt and id wasted an hour of my life but i am way too lazy to do that

#ask #im not gonna post the other one merely because of how bad i feel for my followers #long post

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angelsswirl · 3 years

Text

Vellichor

The One With Very Chaotic Pool Party

"Sugar, we're going down swinging."

Peyton knocked on the door harshly, "Ryland! Hurry the fuck up! Everyone's already here and I haven't even gotten to shower!"

A huff came from behind the locked door, "Go use the one in moms' room!"

"Oh! I can't believe I hadn't thought of that!" Peyton rolled her eyes, even though her older sister wouldn't see it.

"See, there you go."

"That was sarcasm, dipshit. Mom is in there."

"Peyton! Don't call your sister a dipshit!" Jisoo yelled from somewhere in the house.

"How did she even hear that?"

Ryland finally exited the bathroom a few seconds later. Her hair was tied back in a immaculate ponytail with a baby blue scrunchie that corresponded with the rest of her hot weather outfit.

Peyton glared at the young woman, "What were you even doing in there? You look exactly the same?"

Ryland gasped, terrified, she quickly backed into the bathroom again and slammed the door shut.

"Sleep with your eyes open." Peyton muttered at the locked door.

"Peyton! Stop threatening your sister!" Jisoo yelled again.

"What the hell?!" Peyton yelped.

You frowned as you left your bedroom, Kaleb sat on your hip, his swim trunks and rashgaurd coincidentally matching Ryland's baby blue outfit.

"Your mom's right. You need to stop threatening your sister with bodily harm when she does something you don't like."

Peyton's frown deepened, "It wasn't a threat. It was a suggestion. I'd hate for it to be an unfair fight."

You just stared at your youngest daughter, "You know, when Lia dropped you on your head as a baby I didn't really think it would manifest itself into this."

Peyton pouted, "Lia dropped me?!"

"Well, technically it was Jisoo and you landed on the bed. Just..head first. In your mother's defense, she didn't know Lia was going to jump onto her stomach. You were on her chest. It was like those big air blob things you see at summer camp on a lake. It was actually kind of funny. You thought it was too while you were in the air. After you landed, not so much."

"And somehow I still love you." Peyton deadpanned. In all honesty, that story made a whole lot of sense.

"I love you too!"

Kaleb tugged on the collar of your shirt lightly, "Build?"

You smiled at your youngest, "Yeah, we can build. I think mama moved your legos outside, is that okay?"

Kaleb thought about it for a second then nodded. He didn't care where his legos were as long as he got to use them.

You urged Peyton along one more time, before setting off to the backyard.

~•~

"You're going to burn a whole through the poor kid's head if you don't stop staring." Sana said as she pushed the meat around the grill some more. She didn't know what she was doing really. But she was precariously watching a YouTube video with instructions. YouTube University to the rescue once again.

"She wants to defile my child. I know this as fact. That's all I was thinking about at that age." Jisoo said without breaking her gaze.

"And yet, you remained a virgin until 27. Funny how stuff like that works itself out." Irene spoke up, she shooed Sana out of the way of the grill and set about fixing things.

"If I lost my virginity at 27, how would I have had Lia? Oh, you were joking." Jisoo pouted.

"Got it in one." Irene's words dripped sarcasm, "I thought you got over that. Seulgi and I met at 19 and 18, you didn't seem to have a problem about that then."

"I was also 19 and neither you or Seulgi are my fucking daughter. How would you feel if Maya just suddenly walked into your house claiming your sworn enemy's kid was her mate?"

"I killed all my enemies back in the late 90's."

"Could you give me two seconds of sincerity, Irene? Please." Jisoo's shoulders slumped.

Irene rolled her eyes, "Is Maya happy in this scenario?"

Jisoo looked as though she didn't want to answer that question, "Well...yeah."

"Then I'd be happy for her. Like you should be with Ryland."

Sana nodded along with Irene's statement, "As far as I can tell, neither Rosè or Taylor are bad people. Ryalnd is happy. Shouldn't that be all that matters?"

Jisoo huffed defeatedly, "Fine. You're right. I'm going to go talk to the kid."

Jisoo practically stomped off in the direction of the teenager.

Irene looked on with a proud smile, "You know, Sana? I think our little girl is finally growing up." She wiped a fake tear from her eye.

"The ribs are burning." A voice stated from the side of them.

"Shit!"

"Oh hey, Jennie. When did you get here?"

~•~

"Ryland, do you mind if I scare the shit out of your girlfriend? Thank you." Before Ryland could respond, Jisoo dragged Taylor away by the arm.

Taylor stood up straighter and puffed out her chest, "Hello, Mrs. Kim. My name is Taylor Bae-Park and I-"

"Look, kid. I don't need all of that. I just need to know a few things. Do you love my daughter?"

"With every single breath I take."

Jisoo tried to keep her scowl to a minimum.

"Are you treating her right?"

"I like to think so."

"Are you pressuring her into anything she doesn't want to do?"

"Of course not."

Jisoo sighed, "That's...good to hear. Alright, if you end up going all the way with this thing then so be it. Just promise me this, if she ever starts acting like...well, herself and you can't take it anymore, just bring her back. Her mom and I are use to it."

Taylor nodded stiffly then saluted, "You have my word!"

"Did you just sal-you didn't-I'm not..whatever." Jisoo took a sip of the beer she had completely forgotten was in her hand.

Taylor began to walk away, but Jisoo stopped her, "Hey, Taylor? Tell Chaeyoung I said 'Hi'." Taylor nodded with a smile, then jogged back to the edge of the pool.

Jisoo stayed rooted to the spot, almost jumping out of her skin when arms encircled themselves around her waist.

"That was very hot." You practically purred into Jisoo's ear, "You being all protective mama bear. It's a shame we're hosting this little get together, because if we weren't I'd get down on my knees for you and-"

"Okay! Why don't you put a pin in that thought for now, while I go completely submerged myself in the pool for about 10 minutes, yeah?" Jisoo shuffled out of your arms frantically.

You only laughed hysterically as Jisoo awkwardly hobbled to the pool edge then jumped straight in.

"20 years later. Still got it." You gave yourself a mental pat on the back.

~•~

"Jesse Kim! You are way too old for me to have to tell you to stop standing on tables." Lisa shouted up at her son. He had always been a climber. He had given her and Jennie multiple heart attacks as a baby.

Jesse only smiled charmingly at his mother, then set about continuing to do what he was doing, "Friends, Family! I have an announcement to make!"

He had managed to catch everyone's attention, though most of them probably wanted to see if Lisa would throw a shoe at him to get him down.

"As you all know, I was going to go into my second year of college at Julliard, but what you don't know is that last week I got a signed a record deal with Columbia records!" He smiled brightly.

The rest of the partygoers clapped enthusiastically.

"But they suck."

"Peyton!"

"Not only that, but after talking with my 'rents, I've decided to say fuck college and I'm going to perform full time."

"You just couldn't keep it PG, could you?" Lisa took a long sip of her chilled wine. Jesse shook his head with a happy smile.

There's a scraping of a lawn chair against pavement and a dissatisfied huff. No one really notices accept for the people closest.

Jisoo moved to go talk to her oldest daughter, but stopped when a hand is placed on her shoulder.

Jennie shook her head subtly, "I think I have some aunting to do on this one."

Jisoo looked a bit skeptical, but let Jennie walk off in Lia's direction nonetheless, "Alright, but come get me if you need me."

"I got this, Chu."

Lia had stormed around the house to the front stoop. She sat on the step with a huff. An angry tear hit her cheek just before being forcibly wiped away.

"What's up, Li?" Jennie sat on the step next to her. She had a feeling she already knew what the problem was, but it wouldn't do her any good to assume and be wrong.

"...I was supposed to be like you and Aunt Seulgi. But no, I just had to get that stupid disease and it just had to ruin my fucking voice." Lia squeezed her eyes shut to prevent the oncoming spillage of tears. There's an idle throb in her throat as if to taunt her.

Jennie rubbed her back softly, "I know that this is hard for you, Kid. If I knew Jess had planned on doing that, I would have talked him out of it. You know how he gets."

Lia only shrugged and shook her head, "It's whatever. What's done is done. Peyton commited to SUNY. I should be used to it."

"I don't think you should have to get used to your life passing you by. You're not a failure. So, what? You can't sing anymore, but that's not all you are. You're a successful youth soccer coach. You just graduated college. You're completely independent of your parents. Those are all things to celebrate."

Lia nodded softly. Jennie did have a couple of points, "It's just...hard."

"I know, Li, but you're not alone. You've got me, your parents, your siblings, and all of your other family and friends to help."

"Yeah, okay." Lia nodded.

"Now, you want to get back to this party?"

Lia nodded resolutely, "Yeah. Mama said I have to beat Taylor in a game of Chicken Fight to assert my dominance."

Jennie only sighed, "Yeah, that sounds about Jisoo."

#vellichor #jesssica's fanfic #blackpink fanfic #blackpink #jisoo fanfic #jisoo x reader #kim jisoo

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galaxierowls · 3 years

Note

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you!"

—THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, "Why—ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural 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 bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some 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 gentleman 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 view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

"It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore."

"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."

"I'd like to."

"She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's—"

Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else."

At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

Her host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there."

"I don't know a single—"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

"Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—"

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite 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 polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?"

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over tonight."

"Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position."

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?"

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?"

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"

"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables."

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

"I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

Thank you.

#she speaks #ria ur so funny

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