But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone – he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
Again the word was a prayer, incense offered up to a high God through this new and unfathomable darkness.
Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it.
He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room, and found himself washing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved.
Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject with an urbane distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
Back out,’ he suggested after a moment. ‘Put her in reverse.’ ‘But the WHEEL’S off!’ He hesitated. ‘No harm in trying,’ he said.
He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.
The thin tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison, twisted upon the Valais night.
Then Nicole. Rosemary saw her suddenly in a new way and found her one of the most beautiful people she had ever known. Her face, the face of a saint, a viking Madonna, shone through the faint motes that snowed across the candlelight, drew down its flush from the wine-colored lanterns in the pine. She was still as still.
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.
I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then.
Those eyes, with the grayness and eternity of a cliff of soft granite, caught his.
The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights.
Kiss me a paragraph and I’ll reply with a novel.
Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality – he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor.
She would be twenty-nine in February. The month assumed an ominous and inescapable significance – making her wonder, through these nebulous half-fevered hours whether after all she had not wasted her faintly tired beauty, whether there was such a thing as use for any quality bounded by a harsh and inevitable mortality. Years.
He waited rather breathlessly for her next remark...
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
His desire re-created her until she lost all vestiges of the old Jenny, even the girl who had met him at the train that morning. Silently, as the night hours went by, he molded her over into an image of love – an image that would endure as long as love itself, or even longer – not to perish till he could say, ‘I never really loved her.
He had fixed his aunt with the bright-yellow eye, giving her that acute and exaggerated attention that young males are accustomed to render to all females who are of no further value.