The Great Gatsby - Chapter 7

After a pause he added "sir" in a dilatory, grudging way.

And yet I couldn't believe that they would choose this occasion for a scene--especially for the rather harrowing scene that Gatsby had outlined in the garden.

The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer.

"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces.

In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.

The room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool.

"It's a bona fide deal.

The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her mother's dress.

With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to her nurse's hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.

On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea.

"Don't be morbid," Jordan said.

"Women get these notions in their heads----"

"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked.

Jordan and Tom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby's car, Tom pushed the unfamiliar gears tentatively and we shot off into the oppressive heat leaving them out of sight behind.

The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from the edge of the theoretical abyss.

If you're such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?" demanded Jordan crossly.

The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had a bad moment there before I realized that so far his suspicions hadn't alighted on Tom.

Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil but I perceived, after a moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less than twenty feet away.

In one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved aside a little and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car.

So engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed and one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.

Her expression was curiously familiar--it was an expression I had often seen on women's faces but on Myrtle Wilson's face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.

The notion originated with Daisy's suggestion that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as "a place to have a mint julep."

Each of us said over and over that it was a "crazy idea"--we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny.

The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four o'clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park.

As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn's Wedding March from the ballroom below.

"They carried him into my house," appended Jordan, "because we lived just two doors from the church.

Gatsby's foot beat a short, restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.

"It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice," he continued.

At this point Jordan and I tried to go but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain--as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions.

At this point Jordan and I tried to go but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain--as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions.

He looked--and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden--as if he had "killed a man."

She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.

I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over."

Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead.

The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the ashheaps was the principal witness at the inquest.

The circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulation; it was a minute before I could see anything at all.

His eyes would drop slowly from the swinging light to the laden table by the wall and then jerk back to the light again and he gave out incessantly his high horrible call.

Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and after staring around the garage with glazed eyes addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to the policeman.

Only the Negro and I were near enough to hear what he said but the policeman caught something in the tone and looked over with truculent eyes.

Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation.

He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil.

He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil.