You’re not my mother.

“Be a man, my son,” said one priest.

Again a sort of apology arose to my lips.

Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college.

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice.

It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.

We were fifty kilometers from the front, but the adjutant worried about the fire in my kitchen.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations.

Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

We went along the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my kitchen and saying, “You must put it out.”

“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.”

All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why⁠—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces.

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction⁠—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

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 graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War.

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

I had a dog⁠—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away⁠—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

Before I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

No⁠—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires⁠—all for eighty dollars a month.

I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew.

I was rather literary in college⁠—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News⁠—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”

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.

The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.