Carelessness and Moral Decay

Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

"I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why I like you."

It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control.

"No … I just remembered that today's my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

"Self-control!" repeated Tom incredulously. "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea you can count me out … Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white."

I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. 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.

"God sees everything," repeated Wilson.