One hot evening in Milan they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town.

They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away.

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.

It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

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.