The Past and Memory

She wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe—Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.

"Five years next November."

"I'm glad, Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.

For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts, even from our pity.

The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer.

Her expression was curiously familiar—it was an expression I had often seen on women's faces, but on Myrtle Wilson's face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.

Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don't think he had ever really believed in its existence before.