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

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

Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe⁠—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.

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.

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.