She used to be able to understand.

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to,” I said.

You will be able to play football again better than ever.

When I go out there I want to be able to call my shots on the bull.

He had been that hungry before, but had not been able to satisfy it.

I was able to do the commissioner a favour once, and he sends me a Christmas card every year.

For years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never been able to wait for them to cool.

“Yes. Your father has felt for some time that you should be able to take the car out in the evenings whenever you wished but we only talked it over last night.”

They were tired of Dijon and anyway would now be able to say that after leaving Harvard or Columbia or Wabash, they had studied at the University of Dijon, down in the Côte d’Or.

She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring.

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 scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind.

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 strata as herself⁠—that he was fully able to take care of her.

She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.

All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.