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The Great Gatsby: The Only Authorized Edition
The Great Gatsby: The Only Authorized Edition
The Great Gatsby: The Only Authorized Edition
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The Great Gatsby: The Only Authorized Edition

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The only authorized edition of the twentieth-century classic, featuring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateMay 27, 2003
ISBN9780743246392
The Great Gatsby: The Only Authorized Edition
Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) is regarded as one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. His short stories and novels are set in the American ‘Jazz Age’ of the Roaring Twenties and include This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, and Tales of the Jazz Age.

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Rating: 4.180102915951973 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Borrowed froma friend at Bracklesham Bay. A classic and I can see why. Although a little thin on character it was an excellent story. Almost a sketch for a film!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Easy read. Good read. Fun read. Who doesn't like the Great Gatsby?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Perhaps my favorite book. I love the characters, the dialog, & the absence of the narrator.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Everyone should read this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Jay Gatsby has moved to West Egg in search of his love, Daisy, who is now married to Tom Buchanan. Carraway, Gatsby's next door neithbor narrates the book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I had the feeling that I had read this book years ago. Maybe I saw it as a movie and now a new version of the movie has come out. At any event, I was really moved to read it because I had started reading a book by Roy Peter Clark called The Art of X Ray Reading. It's really about literary analysis and the first example he uses is "The Great Gatsby" and it piqued my curiosity. And, I rather liked the prose extracts that Clark uses. So I bought the book. And when I found it was so short I read it quite quickly. I'm not really a great reader of fiction but thought Fitzgerald's book was a delight. A tight story line, great characterisation, and the script itself almost like poetry...."For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at the fall of dusk". And this: "There was music from my neighbour's house through the simmer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars." New York in the twenties .....decadence and wealth on display. Casual immorality such as Tom Buchanan keeping a mistress. And Daisy's presumed infidelity......is not really judged by the narrator. He does't condemn doesn't condone...merely reports like a good reporter recording the facts. The mystery surrounding Jay Gatsby develops throughout the book. There are intricate connections such as between the green light at the start of the book and at the end...but also precisely in the middle. The mysterious phone call from Chicago after Gatsby's death about "Young Parke" being in trouble when he handed the bonds over the counter. No other explanations ..a seemingly disconnected piece of information that throws a distinct shadow over Jay Gatsby's financial dealings. The Oxford connection ....assumed by Tom Buchanan to be phony ...but shown to probably be real...and Carraway "had one of those renewals of complete faith in him".Or this: "He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour".I really like the book. Must admit that I have never really been a great fan of some of the other American classics such as "Catcher in the Rye" and "to Kill a Mockingbird". But Gatsby I liked. Was there a moral in there somewhere.....well maybe the idea that money doesn't necessarily buy happiness. Or maybe, in hindsight, that this kind of corrupt lifestyle was setting them up for the great depression. And there is the class stratification clearly drawn between old money in East Egg and new money in West Egg. And the "unutterable truth " that it was not Gatsby that killed Myrtle ...but Daisy......Daisy and Tom ...were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or vast carelessness....and let other people clean up the mess they had made. But overall, it was a story well-told. Happy to recommend this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Great American Novel? Discuss.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Interesting rags to riches to oblivion novel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A powerful slice of nouveau riche New York.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the decrepit side of the American Dream, which truly erupted during the 1920s. With a darkness stirring inside Gatsby, a feeling of loneliness takes hold, and his longing for an old flame sparks into reality. Readers come to learn that life as a glamourous host is not all it’s cracked up to be; his heart, head, and identity is jumbled beyond recognition; the person he could have married is seemingly unattainable; the green light he is so set on is merely a feebly lit lantern. All in all, superficiality reigns supreme in the mansion Gatsby calls his “home”.The snazzy millionaire changed everything about himself, from his name to the uneducated dialect of his youth. While watching his story unfold, one uncovers the languished lifestyle of the rich and infamous. Looking for a taste of champagne with a dash of insanity? Pick up this book and join the party, old sport.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I read this book in print years ago. I didn't really enjoy it that much then. This time I listened to the audio version narrated by Anthony Heald. As much as I wanted to like the book better, I didn't. I just hate the characters and do not relate to them. While I recognize the writing is quite good, I simply do not like the story.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The beginning i fragmented and awkward, but it picks up speed in the middle.
    I immediately liked Owl Eyes. He ends up being one of the very few to attend Gatsby's funeral.
    I dislike Daisy and Tom. I feel sorry for Gatsby.
    his unethical business partner or the man that made him rich, told Nick Carroway, pg. 180 "Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead." (Meyer Wolfsheim)
    I also didn't like the abstract descriptions given, almost out of context.
    Most of the characters behave as victims of their lives when they made the choices. (they didn't take responsibility.)
    It's an okay book. I don't understand why it's a classic. I don't feel it surpasses time. I didn't understand a lot of the "current lingo" of the book.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Oh the drama!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    De figuur Gatsby: eigenlijk heel negatief, maar toch sympathiek want passioneel; inhoudsloos leven in functie van obsesssie: liefde voor Daisy. Doordesemd van melancholie. Typische Scott Fitzgerald: Jazz Age, jetset. Opmerkelijk: de ik-figuur spreekt geen oordeel uit, registreert, maar geleidelijk aan toch opinievorming
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A great read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Awesome novel: 'awesome' used in every sense of the word and not as currently popular argot. What a great storyteller Fitzgerald is! What precise, evocative prose that captured the essence of a scene both as sensation and feeling! How thoroughly and lucidly American this novel is! It holds up a mirror not only to those long ago times but to essential American ethos.I've read this book for the first time later in life and was glad of it, as maturity, I think, gave me a deeper appreciation. Can't what to read it again to mark the prose parts I thought were shattering. (couldn't mark up the book the first time, it was too precious) Have to admit I read it slowly over many mornings' coffee, mostly for the prose but the story line also clipped on drawing me to the next chapter the next morning.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Beautifully written about rich vain shallow empty people who live vain shallow empty lives.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    so i finally read this classic and enjoyed the ending but that was about all; just way way too much silly build up in the story with out enough build up of the characters
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Reread in 2017. Think when I first read it as a 17 year old I was seduced by the glamour. Rereading it now, I'm bowled over by the spare writing and the structure - having more down-to-earth Nick Carraway, Gatsby's new neighbour as the narrator and observer.Through Nick we gradually learn how Gatsby has invented himself, his dream being epitomised by his obsessional idea of Daisy, a society girl with the sound of money in her voice.A fantastic evocation of the Roaring Twenties and the hollowness of the American Dream.Glamorous, funny and ultimately very sad. Loved it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I just re-read this today. A great short novel. Captures the frivolity and decadence of post WW1 USA. Nick, the Buchanans and all the other fleeting characters create an engaging yet ultimately tragic picture of the jazz age.
    13/7/12
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I finally read this after avoiding it for so many years (am 47 now) and couldn't decide which was more amazing: that the book was so unimpressive or that so many people consider it to be their favorite. As a story, it was sorely lacking in anything that could keep my attention; I read it in one day, but had to force myself to finish, if only because I wanted to know what the big deal was. I cannot understand how this is considered to be a literary masterpiece (from the back cover).
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Mixed feelings about this one. Will need to return to it again.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It deserves to be called the Greatest American Novel as it has many attributes. The society of the 1920's in upper class New York is showcased within the twisting romantic plot. The scenes are iconic of the Jazz Age and ring true. Reading Fitzgerald is like skiiing downhill, it is smooth but surprising. Always a good book to re-read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I dithered between and 3 and 4 stars for this. The book starts very slowly and you need to stick with it until anything much happens. In that way it reminded me of Heart of Darkness and like that book after finishing it I feel as if I need to read it again sometime to get the full thing. And there is a lot to get. Obsession, moral decay, decadence, old money v new money, wealth and status etc. Towards the end a web has been woven between the characters that results in a climax that could not be described as wholly just. However, I cared so little for most of the characters it failed to have much impact on me. Maybe next time I read it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    To me, this is very typical, run-of-the-mill, nothing special, piece of realistic fiction (I was so tempted to write piece of... something else). Due to the fact that it's supposed to be this gold-standard of literature, I feel the need to be a bit more critical of it. This is my honest-to-goodness opinion of the book:It's People Magazine for the thinking man. That is to say, its pretty, pretentious words and syntax mask the fact that the plot was an inane, stale cliche during the time of the Ancient Greeks: overdone, obnoxious love-triangles. Not a single damn spark existed between any of the couples in this book. Jay is portrayed as being "mysterious" and "intriguing," but it's very hard to create any interest in a character with a "mysterious past" when everything we see of him in the present is so flat and boring. Gatsby is like those really horrible holographic cards that used to come in cereal boxes; you can see how flat they are, but there's this cute little illusion of depth that simply isn't there.If you're a reasonably intelligent person that wants to hide the fact that they are entertained by such plebeian tripe as MTV Cribs and TMZ, this crap is for you. It's all about the dramatic lives of the "haves" as viewed by a member of the middle class. 
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the story of a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night. He is a surprisingly young man who affects an English accent, has a remarkable smile, and calls everyone “old sport.” This book is about his life, his love, his loss, his achievements, and a lot more.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It was nice to read this book on my own as opposed to reading it rushed in school, as I did the first time. I still loved it! Not much else to say except it is a classic that everyone should read
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    There are many books that I read or attempted to read while in high school that got a big "booooo" from me at that young age. The Great Gatsby was one of them. Now that I am an adult (sort of) with a more mature view on life (right?), perhaps I should go back and re-read these "classics"? Would anyone be interested in persuading me to read this one?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is another of those classics I've been promising myself I'd get around to for years, and now I have, and yet again I've been blown away.

    I seem to remember reading Tender Is The Night years ago, but can remember next to nothing about it. I suspect that Fitzgerald, like Jane Austen, is one of those authors you can be too young to read, and tragically, they are also the sort of authors that are given to kids as required reading.

    But as for The Great Gatsby, it's a wonderful take on ambitions, dreams, and the semi-permeable boundaries of class. Gatsby lives alone in his massive house in West Egg, hosting lavish parties, and is an object of fascination to new arrival Nick Carraway, who lives in a small house next door. Gatsby, who trails an aura of vague notoriety wherever he goes, is in love with the glamorous Daisy, who is seemingly unhappily married to the stymied, bullying, unfaithful Tom. Tragedy ensues.

    The thing that struck me most is how exquisitely filtered everything is. We follow Nick as these characters open up to him, like Chinese dolls, revealing different facets of themselves as everything rushes to its denouement. They are faithless and shallow, and it is Gatsby, the fraud and criminal, who at least sticks true to his doomed dream. For such a small book, it really delivers pounds per punch.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed it but it is (obviously) dated. The characters don't quite speak to me, though there are touches of universality with Gatsby, Tom, Daisy, and Nick. But even they are caricature like - the novel is only 140 pages (in my version), it's hardly enough time to bring a lot of nuance to the characters.

    The ending was somewhat satisfying, though it was for reasons other than what people might think. I think the characterization of Daisy was appropriate, which was my biggest concern, and Gatsby also felt a lot more vulnerable at the end, than just this incredibly aloof millionaire.

Book preview

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

CHAPTER I

IN MY YOUNGER and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the creative temperament—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.


My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, Why—ye-es, with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weatherbeaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

How do you get to West Egg Village? he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man. This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming-pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away; for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final, he seemed to say, just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are. We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

I’ve got a nice place here, he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half-acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.

It belonged to Demaine, the oil man. He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. We’ll go inside.

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eye she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that

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