‘Bles-sed pre-cious,’ she crooned, holding out her arms.
‘Come to your own mother that loves you.’
The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her mother’s dress.
‘The Bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowy hair? Stand up now, and say How-de-do.’
Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand. Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before.
‘I got dressed before luncheon,’ said the child, turning eagerly to Daisy.
‘That’s because your mother wanted to show you off.’ Her face bent into the single wrinkle of the small white neck.
‘You dream, you. You absolute little dream.’
‘Yes,’ admitted the child calmly. ‘Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress too.’
‘How do you like mother’s friends?’ Daisy turned her around so that she faced Gatsby. ‘Do you think they’re pretty?’‘Where’s Daddy?’
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The Great Gatsby
‘She doesn’t look like her father,’ explained Daisy. ‘She looks like me. She’s got my hair and shape of the face.’
Daisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held out her hand.
‘Come, Pammy.’
‘Goodbye, sweetheart!’
With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to her nurse’s hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.
Gatsby took up his drink.
‘They certainly look cool,’ he said, with visible tension.
We drank in long greedy swallows.
‘I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,’ said Tom genially. ‘It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it’s just the opposite—the sun’s getting colder every year.
‘Come outside,’ he suggested to Gatsby, ‘I’d like you to have a look at the place.’
I went with them out to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby’s eyes followed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay.
‘I’m right across from you.’
‘So you are.’
Our eyes lifted over the rosebeds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog days along shore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean and the abounding Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
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blessed isles.
‘There’s sport for you,’ said Tom, nodding. ‘I’d like to be out there with him for about an hour.’
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, moulding 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 1
