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

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

Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.

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

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him⁠—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office.

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.”

His family were enormously wealthy⁠—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach⁠—but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.