slenderly - languidly - unobtrusively

-------[excerpt, The Great Gatsby]---------------Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset....

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire.  They were here -- and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained.  They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away.  It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret.  "Can't you talk about crops or something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently.  "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.  Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book and everybody ought to read it.  The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be -- will be utterly submerged.  It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness.  "He reads deep books with long words in them.  What was that
word we ---"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently.  "This fellow has worked out the whole thing.  It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California ---" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics.  I am and you are and you are and ---"  After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again, "---and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization -- oh, science and art and all that.  Do you see?"

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more....

------------------  "Did you give Nick a little heart-to-heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly.

"Did I?"  She looked at me.  "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race.  Yes, I'm sure we did.  It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know---"

"Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home.  They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light....

------------------  Nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away.  It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms -- but apparently there were no such intentions in her head.  As for Tom the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book.  Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard.  The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. 

The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone -- fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars.  Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him.  Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction.  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 away, 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.
-------------[end excerpt]

{The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Copyright, 1925.  Charles Scribner's Sons}

Somehow, I like the word "unquiet."
"the unquiet darkness"
"...and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness."

Willie Nelson has a terrific song called "Uncloudy Day" --
"Unquiet" and "uncloudy" are words that I would not ordinarily think of.  But I like them.

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