The Great Gatsby - Chapter 8

Crossing his lawn I saw that his front door was still open and he was leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.

We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches--once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano.

There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere and the rooms were musty as though they hadn't been aired for many days.

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody--told it to me because "Jay Gatsby" had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out.

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody--told it to me because "Jay Gatsby" had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out.

There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year's shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered.

He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

I don't mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself--that he was fully able to take care of her.

I don't mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself--that he was fully able to take care of her.

It was a cold fall day with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed.

Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by.

He looked at me anxiously as if he hoped I'd corroborate this.

Up in the city I tried for a while to list the quotations on an interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel-chair.

I suppose there'd be a curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark spots in the dust and some garrulous man telling over and over what had happened until it became less and less real even to him and he could tell it no longer and Myrtle Wilson's tragic achievement was forgotten.

This was a forlorn hope--he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend: there was not enough of him for his wife.

He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden.

It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.