Someone had the bull by the tail.

“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?

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

Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name.

Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.

Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through.

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

Over his head was a bull’s head, stuffed by a Madrid taxidermist; on the walls were framed photographs and bullfight posters.

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end.

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.

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 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.

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 motorboat that bumped the tide offshore.

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.

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.

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.