“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 wonder to the gulls that fly overhead.