---------------- [excerpt from The Great Gatsby] ------------------- We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened too against the heat, and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale.
"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years?"
"Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."
"But it's so hot," insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, "and everything's so confused. Let's all go to town!" Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, molding its senselessness into forms.
"I've heard of making a garage out of a stable," Tom was saying to Gatsby, "but I'm the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage."
"Who wants to go to town?" demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby's eyes floated toward her. "Ah," she cried, "you look so cool."
Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. "You always look so cool," she repeated.
She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.
He was astounded.
His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time ago.
"You resemble the advertisement of the man," she went on innocently. "You know the advertisement of the man --"
"All right," broke in Tom quickly, "I'm perfectly willing to go to town. Come on - we're all going to town."
He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No one moved.
"Come on!" His temper cracked a little. "What's the matter, anyhow? If we're going to town, let's start." His hand, trembling with his effort at self-control, bore to his lips the last of his glass of ale. Daisy's voice got us to our feet and out on to the blazing gravel drive.
"Are we just going to go?" she objected. "Like this? Aren't we going to let any one smoke a cigarette first?"
"Everybody smoked all through lunch."
"Oh, let's have fun," she begged him. "It's too hot to fuss."
He didn't answer.
"Have it your own way," she said. "Come on, Jordan."
They went up-stairs to get ready while we three men stood there shuffling the hot pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the moon hovered already in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed his mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly.
"Have you got your stables here?" asked Gatsby with an effort.
"About a quarter of a mile down the road."
"Oh."
A pause.
"I don't see the idea of going to town," broke out Tom savagely. "Women get these notions in their heads --"
"Shall we take anything to drink?" called Daisy from an upper window.
"I'll get some whiskey," answered Tom. He went inside.
Gatsby turned to me rigidly: "I can't say anything in his house, old sport."
"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of --" I hesitated.
"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money - that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it.... high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl....
_____________________
{The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Charles Scribner's Sons - 1925.}
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