Nick komt aan in West Egg

Her host looked at her incredulously. "Really!" He knocked back the contents of his glass as if it were a last drop at the bottom. "How you ever get anything done is a mystery to me." I looked at Miss Baker and wondered what it was that she "got done." I found it pleasant to look at her. She was slender, with small breasts and a ramrod-straight posture that she accentuated by pulling her body back from the shoulders like a young cadet.

Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me from a wan, charming, discontented face with polite reciprocal curiosity. It occurred to me that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before. "So you live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know someone there."

"I don't know a soul –" "You must know Gatsby." "Gatsby?" asked Daisy. "What Gatsby?" Before I could answer that he was my neighbor, dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slender and languid, their hands lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us onto a rosy-colored porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

"Why candles?" Daisy objected frowning. She snuffed them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it's the longest day of the year." She looked at all of us radiantly. "Do you always watch out for the longest day of the year and then forget it anyway? I always watch out for the longest day of the year and then forget it anyway."

"We should plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed. "All right," said Daisy. "What shall we plan?" She turned to me helplessly: "What do people plan?"

Before I could answer anything, her eyes fixed on her little finger filled with dismay. "Look!" she complained, "I've hurt it." We all looked – the knuckle was bruised.