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jalshristovski · 4 months

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what's your opinion about the Nordics?

Omg a real life ask!!! In real life!!!

I would like to preface by saying the Nordics are some of my favourite characters in the whole series, I love them dearly

But let’s start with my favourite two characters in the entire show

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Sweden:

He is my favourite and my all time comfort character. He’s so dad-coded, and I love him for it. I love how awkward he is, and the gentle giant vibes fit him so well

Also the fact he is our canon gay rep, it fits him so well but mayhaps Himaruya looked at some Finnish memes about Sweden lol

I love how soft he is, and how he’s such a real character. For someone who doesn’t show up as much as some other characters do, he has so much depth to his personality. He’s deeply caring about his neighbours, especially Finland and Iceland, but he’s also considerate of everyone else (even if he’s not entirely sure HOW to do it). His communication issues sometimes hold him back from working at his full potential but I think that makes him more human. Even with those issues he still has close friends and companions, which I think he more than deserves

As scary as he is, he is so kind and considerate of everyone, even if it doesn’t come across as such, and I think he is just so wonderful for that. Ok, maybe not to Denmark but I think that is justified

He is in no way perfect, but he does his best for everyone and is constantly willing to inconvenience himself for others (especially Finland)

Iceland:

Also my favourite character and comfort character, I always interpret him a little more chaos gen z than is maybe canon but I still think it fits with his actual personality

As emo as he is, you can tell he really cares what other people think of him and I think his need to feel like an equal tracks pretty well with how teens are. Especially I think the inferiority complex fits not only with his physical age but his actual age too, because he ISN’T a young country. He’s older than much of modern Europe, but with how disconnected, physically younger, and perhaps more culturally/political irrelevant he is, he feels like he maybe will never be seen as an equal unless he argues for it

Tying him back to Sweden as well though, I like the bond they share with Sweden treating him as an equal but also trying to teach him it’s ok to not be so serious all the time (like with the ‘what’s wrong with big brother?’ bit) (also ironic coming from Sve who is perceived as super super serious. Though we know he’s just a silly goofy guy)

I also like seeing his soft side, like when he told Romano “deep down you don’t mind it so much” in regards to being teased by others, showing maybe it does bother him a bit to be teased but he knows it’s just good fun, not serious

I think Iceland really just gets teased too much by the other Nordics (mostly Norway tbh). Enough that it’s bothersome and maybe it’s starting to not FEEL like a joke, but he knows it is. Deep inside he knows they see him as an equal, and I think that really gives him personality when it shows in moments like with Romano, but also like the Nordic meeting where they joked about the drinking age

I think he’s a good interpretation of a teen/young adult just doing his best, but also someone who is very accomplished but doesn’t get much credit for what he’s done

Denmark:

Another very deep character, I think a lot deeper than most people give him credit for

He’s of course somewhat of a comic relief, the sunshine character, golden retriever-type character but he also has his moments where he shines and truly shows his character. He jokes a lot but he’s a very worried older brother of the Nordics who seems to almost worry over them like a parent would. But also I think he doesn’t realise how much the other Nordics appreciate him

Like the scene he found out Norway was living in deep poverty without complaint because he saw how hard Denmark was working, and Denmark started sobbing because of how much it meant to him, presumably the emotions behind getting noticed for what he does

Also having been to Denmark I think he’s pretty in-character. Danes are super super friendly and I think a lot more open than they give themselves credit for. Genuinely the nicest people I have ever met, probably. So I see where he gets it. Denmark and the Danish people aren’t perfect but they’re certainly welcoming, hardworking, and overall very friendly, which definitely reflects in him

Norway:

I think the levels of ‘I’m so done’ this man radiates all the time is very great and tbh maybe a reflection of how Norwegians feel about the other Nordic countries (more specifically the other Scandinavian countries)

Though on the same note, he’s definitely a lot nicer than he too is given credit for. When it really counts he speaks his mind, and I think he is very considerate of the other Nordic countries regardless of maybe some grievances

I the a lot of the time he just follows along with what the other Nordics do without much input (aside from a few maybe mean jokes) which maybe is a reflection of him basically getting pushed around between Sweden and Denmark for a very long time. I think he’s not much afraid to share his opinion or make comments but habitually he follows the others anyway

Regardless though I like how sometimes goofy he is. His mean sense of humour I think is relatable to a lot of people, including myself. It really does give the dynamic with Iceland of older/younger sibling, with bully older sibling and perpetually annoyed younger sibling. I think their personalities mesh perfectly into those roles

Finland:

As a Sweden stan I absolutely love Finland too. I love how he interacts differently yet so same to everyone, yet he is always kind. Even if he’s feeling awkward or annoyed he never gives the impression of being mean or rude. I think he fits so well in a group of characters who genuinely might usually just bully the fuck out of each other

I love that he isn’t super out of place regardless of his differences especially with his language, and while he might make some comments about it, ultimately he is one of the Nordic 5. It’s never the Nordics and Finland, they are the Nordic 5

Also it’s a little goofy but good goofy that he’s this sweet guy, he’s an angel, always sunshine and flowers in regards to his energy but when he gets to choose names and designs it’s always so dark and dreadful as an homage to perpetual Finnish misery with aura and demeanour (and being the largest producers of heavy metal in the world). He found a way to combine them being the happiest country in the world, but also (affectionately) hardasses

I also like how he interacts with the non-Nordics, and how they interact with him. Like him and Germany being on friendly terms, even if it’s not a whole lot of interaction, it’s enough you can see he’s friendly with everyone (except Russia), not just his neighbours. Conversation about Germany’s lunch, friendly (or maybe not so friendly) banter about America with England and France (although they kinda clowned him, he was very nice to them). Justice for Finland and the butter churn ✊😔

I think it’s also a great that he’s not afraid to be a little silly goofy, he’s kinda like a Gen X midwestern mom in that aspect and genuinely I am obsessed

EXTRAS!!!!

Sealand:

I LOVE!! THIS BOY!!

It is genuinely so random that he is atp one of the Nordics, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. It makes my soul happy to know that while most people find Sweden scary, Sealand just sees him as his goofy pappa that he is NOT afraid of 🫵

I think his relationship with the other Nordics isn’t touched on as much as it is with Sweden and Finland (mostly Sweden) but I still think it’s sweet he’s shown as part of the family regardless. Also knowing Sweden made the little curl when he was cosplaying as Canada is so silly, Sweden going along with his child’s shenanigans is what I thrive on

I love how friendly and open Sealand is, but how like a light switch he can go to calling someone a jerk and bragging about himself. Even to people who are mean to him though, he is kind. Yet sometimes to people who aren’t England he just flips the brat switch and I think that’s so good for a kid his age

I think the thing most compelling about his character is that he IS a kid. He acts like a child. People sometimes have said he’s annoying but he’s ??? 12??? We were all weird as 12 year olds. If he was totally mature it would be strange

Ladonia:

Random fun fact, I have Ladonian citizenship lol. It has no legal binding but I technically qualify as a citizen of the internet country and have been since 2020 🤌 anyway

Onto his character. I think he’s a very interesting take on Ladonia as a place. I don’t know what personality I’d give to Ladonia personally but I think the choice for him was super creative and silly, and I love him

As far as I remember he doesn’t have a canon age but I’m pretty sure he is younger than Sealand, so he’s still very much a young child and acts as such. A kid who loves Pokémon and practices how he introduces himself to people, still believes in Santa, and also reminiscent of a kid who tries (and fails) to grow up too fast

I think in the recent chapters he’s been shown to be a lot more mature and kind (ofc he was a little mean previously) to the others which could either just be a change in personality, or just character development from him. And I like it, because if it is character development for him, I think it just goes to show that he’s grown fond of the other micronations over time

One last thing I will mention is the scripts. I think it’s so silly, and I love how obvious the scripts are yet Ladonia doesn’t seem to notice or mind them because Sweden pays attention to him and those scripts usually give power to Ladonia, like genuinely just the monotone screams and the ‘I lost my meatballs’ line showing Ladonia may have bested him (when we know he genuinely would not have) but Sweden still tries to give him that power in a silly way

~~~~

Anyway that’s all I have, thank you for listening and if you read this far, THANK YOU!!! I apologise for the length, I really love the Nordics so much, they’re my favourite characters and I am so fond of them and their characters

I’ve given them much fanon personality as well but I tried to keep this mostly relevant to canon so anyway, thank you 💪

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nordic-language-love · 4 years

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About Productivity Grids

I’ve seen more and more people starting to use the productivity grids I’ve been using this year to track my progress (which is awesome), along with concerns about them being toxic and putting the focus on “filling in the grid” rather than actually being productive. So! I thought I’d make a post about how I use them and how to avoid that icky feeling that you’re not being “productive enough”.

What is a productivity grid?

Here’s an example of my productivity grid from this week:

As you can see, I split my different areas of productivity into subsections and mark each day I do them. I fill it in each week, then I take a screenshot to post to my language learning log before clearing it out and filling it in again the next week.

A lot of people use powerpoint for their grids. I use excel with conditional formatting (so I just pop an ‘x’ or ‘/’ in a box and it automatically changes colour, which is super exciting for my dumbass monkey brain). You can use whatever works for you though - I used to print out tables and put gold stars in each square I completed.

What it’s good for

This grid is great for keeping track of things. You can therefore use it to:

See which areas you’ve been working on and which ones you’ve been neglecting. This is a major one for me, because I would go for literally months without doing any speaking practise and only realise when I went back through my blog to find that one recording of me speaking. Now I can see at a glance if I’ve done any speaking practice this week, or last week. All in all, it helps me balance my studying a lot more.

Help you decide what to work on next. Sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed by the choice of what to study. Do I pick up my grammar book? Do I watch the news in my TL? Do I read my book? So then I’ll look at my grid and think “well, I’ve been doing a lot of reading this week but I’ve not spent any time on grammar, so I’ll do that.”

Make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Before I used these for studying, I had a similar grid for self-care, which I filled with things like “went for a walk” and “ate three meals” and “had at least one vegetable” and “read a book” and “talked to a friend”. You can see I’ve included some elements of that in this grid, and honestly I think this is very very important to include.

Understand and predict burn-out. It’s quite easy to see if you’ve been overworking yourself. If you have a lot of full squares one week and a lot of blank squares the next, you can think to yourself “huh, maybe I worked too hard and that wasn’t good for me, clearly I need more balance.”

And of course, it does provide some motivation for yourself if, like me, you love things to be super colourful. Do I sometimes push myself to do a thing just because I want extra colour on my spreadsheet? Yes, absolutely.

Limitations

If you’re looking at this and thinking “I should do that so that I keep myself accountable to my followers”, then I highly recommend you do not use this method. If you do, keep it in a word document for yourself. The goal is not to threaten yourself with a blank grid of shame. The goal is, as I said before, to keep track of things for your own benefit.

Additionally, this only provides quantitative data, and doesn’t give any indication of how much you did. If you spend thirty minutes on an essay every day for a week, you’ll fill more squares than if you spend 5 hours on that essay in one night. Even though you actually spent more time on it, you would seem less “productive”. That’s why I always use it alongside a written log.

Another thing is that there are always situations you don’t account for that don’t fit on the grid. Spent all day cheering up your best friend after her boyfriend broke her heart? Yeah, that’s not gonna show up, so you might end up with a whole day that’s blank.

Some tips for using productivity grids

Be flexible! I’m always swapping my grids around to reflect what I’m working on. I used to have full grids for Icelandic and Finnish, but they took more of a backseat so I shrunk them down to fit in alongside Japanese. You can always add in more grids or take ones out.

Use it to track “unproductive” activities too (if you want). I cannot stress this enough: self-care counts as productive! Cooking yourself a nice meal is productive. Choosing to watch a Disney movie because you’re tired and the thought of studying makes you want to cry is productive. Calling your friend and admitting you’re not okay is productive. Spending time on your hobbies is productive (languages and writing are a hobby for me, so like 70% of my grid is actually devoted to hobbies). Of course, if you then feel like you’re forcing yourself to do your hobbies just to fill in an extra square, take that line out.

Keep a written log of your feelings and accomplishments. In my language log I talk about how well I feel I understood things, how tired I’ve been feeling, what I’ve struggled with and what I’m proud of. This will give more context to your grid, as well as help with identifying those patterns we talked about earlier (if I’m feeling tired and nothing’s working and I notice I’ve not been exercising, I can try the following week to exercise more and compare how I feel).

Never aim for a full grid. You should always have blank spaces - you can’t do everything all the time! If you find you’re consistently filling everything in, you might need to evaluate whether your habits are healthy.

If there are consistently a lot of blank spaces in a particular area, evaluate why. Are you not doing any writing because you’re uninspired? Anxious? Are you just focused on something else right now? Is it so important to you that you do it? Have a think about the reason and whether it’s something that needs addressing or not. (My writing grid is often blank or nearly blank, but that’s fine because it’s not something I want to pursue professionally. My stretching/performance grids being as blank as they are though, well, that is a problem that I need to address.)

If you’re not sure whether something “counts” or not, add levels to it. See how I have some boxes marked with a / instead of an X with a lighter background? Those were when I told myself “this doesn’t really count”. I only stretched when I warmed up, I only spoke a few broken sentences to myself, I did half a Duolingo lesson then quit etc. For a long time, I didn’t mark them in at all. Now I do because I was getting too harsh on myself. You could always try ranking your sessions based on how intense/productive they were, or putting in numbers to show how much time you spent on them. This doesn’t work for everyone though and can add further pressure.

Remember your followers appreciate honesty. Like I said earlier, you don’t have to post these to tumblr; you can keep them for yourself (either in a word document or a spreadsheet or print them out etc). But if you do post them, remember that giving your followers an unhealthy impression of always being productive won’t do them any favours. So embrace those blank squares and don’t feel ashamed.

If you start to feel anxious about how “little” you’re achieving, or like it’s preventing you from being truly productive, stop using it. No method works for everyone and you should never feel pressured to continue using a method that doesn’t work for you just because other people on tumblr do it (just like I never take aesthetic pictures because spending all that time and effort setting them up burns me out before I’ve even started).

Happy studying, everyone! Go smash those goals and remember to look after yourselves while you do it.

#productivity #studying #languages #language blog #langblr

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puppy-phum · 3 years

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Fic Writer Interview Meme

thank you for tagging me @hils79 ♥ this is a great way to avoid writing my pingxie wing au which i currently struggle with bc am editing it into a completely new shape :D it’s exhausting but am making slow progress~

name: vish or vishie. won’t even advertise my irl name when it comes to fic writing haha

fandoms: so many more than i’ve ever gotten to write for. i am simply very slow at writing and the stuff i get into is way too many so... yeah. the most i’ve written for are BTS, The Untamed and now DMBJ. the list for fandoms i’d love to write for is endless but currently at least Guardian is very high up there. i keep having ideas but writing? not as much.

two-shot: i wrote this one two-shot back when i was still writing fanfics in finnish for this one youtuber group lol. it was supposed to be a oneshot but it got super sad so i made it happier with a continuation later on.

most popular multi-chapter fic: uuhh i’d say it’s my BTS abo fic My Lungs for You to Breathe which is currently at 98k words and 18 chapters but which i haven’t updated in almost a year :D idk if it will ever get to the end but i have enjoyed spending time with it. (Statistics: Subscriptions: 227 Hits: 11718 Kudos: 461 Comment Threads: 89 Bookmarks: 153)

actual worst part of writing: uuuhhh it’s so hard to name one currently? trying to get things out like i want them to and still sounding coherent? figuring out words that sound good but also make sense? idk. i love writing but these days i’ve been very stuck and insecure about it :/

how you choose your titles: i throw in words. i throw in more words. i stir. ta-da!

do you outline: i have not outlined on paper ever in my life. in my head tho? yes, absolutely. i am just too lazy and awkward to write it down. then i forget. oops. or then i don’t forget and get haunted or possessed, there’s no in between.

ideas you probably won’t get around to, but wouldn’t it be nice: this one historical au for Guardian which would also include some reincarnation themes. it would require a ton of research so am a bit scared. also, a DMBJ cultivator au just so that i could have pingxie and heihua meet in very different circumstances and have them use cool magic stuff. plus all the other characters having neat stories and skills and outfits. me and @ashenlights are throwing around a ton of ideas probably every day and have a docs file and some pins on pinterest etc :’D i will never probably actually write this bc it would get way too huge but the brainstorming is nice ♥ also i have this one pingxie reincarnation/soulmates au that haunts me currently but idk if i will have the motivation to write that.

and then my personal favorite: a fic for The Journey Across the Night where i get to explore the main trio’s relationship developing throughout the series (and probably even after that) while each of them slowly figures out how much they love the other two. first part would be shi cheng who first watches chacha and li jia having a crush on each other meanwhile he ignores any of his own feelings towards li jia and what he’s doing to distract himself from that. second part would be chacha who notices shi cheng’s feelings for li jia and tries to figure out how she will take that while maintaining her own developing relationship with li jia plus her family problems. last part would be li jia who follows chacha and shi cheng going from friends to something else. he doesn’t understand. he has a lot of other stuff in his mind. there’s his alter making his first appearance. he might or might not be in love with both of his friends but needs a tiny nudge to get it, especially with shi cheng. i lack the skill and words to accomplish any of this so i just like to daydream.

callouts @ me: actually the same as for you hils, that’s a good call out :’D i really should try some female characters once in a while. but they have slowly come a part of my stories at least? another one would be: pls for the love of god learn more vocabulary. and ways to form sentences. and like,,, stop editing those sentences so much, they’re fine.

best writing traits: uuuhhh can i just skip this? these days it’s not easy to find anything positive to say about my own writing or my process with it. i am a mess. some stuff makes sense, a big part does not. maybe emotion but i feel like i cannot manage that either in a way that would satisfy me? persistence works too. i rarely abandon things completely.

spicy tangential opinion: um. yours was very good hils, that made me so happy ^^ i should really try not to pressure myself to be perfect either just for the acknowledgement etc. this is a hobby yes and should be fun. which it is. but i struggle still sigh. idk what else to add really? write whatever you like. write those themes that you want to see. write the characters you want to see written in the way only you feel about them. write that pairing no one else has written. write for the fandom that doesn’t even show up on ao3. write for yourself, truly. write for your tiny group of friends who yell at you and are lovely and as crazy as you ♥ enjoy the process despite it being awful at times. writing is learning but also, don’t only just pressure yourself to improve with every sentence you write. i tend to do that a lot bc am so desperate to be better but i cannot force that into me. i gain experience slowly and learn at my own pace. i need to allow myself that. and sometimes i just need to allow myself to write whatever and have fun with it and not think about how much sense everything makes or if the characterization is 150% perfect. thanks for coming to my ted talk haha

this was so nice :’) it’s sometimes nice to think about myself as a writer and then come up with things that i should take note of more often. i hope to write so much. i have so many ideas. my heart is filled with love for some many things. praying for all the time and inspiration for myself and all of my writer friends ♥

tagging only @i-am-just-a-kiddo if they wish to join me on this one :’) also tagging @kholran who was calling for everyone in their own post! that one was so nice to read too ^^

#tag game #pls do not perceive me #i do not like perceiving myself djhkfdg #thank you for this either way #i hope any of this makes sense

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quicksilversquared · 4 years

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Helpfulness with a Side of Spite

Superheroes are kind. Superheroes are patient. Superheroes are helpful.

....that doesn’t mean that superheroes can’t manipulate the situation, though. And they’ll do it with a smile on their face.

links in the reblog

Superheroes were, practically by definition, meant to be helpful.

Ladybug and Chat Noir helped all of Paris by fighting supervillains and restoring the city. They helped save lives and property alike if they happened to be nearby when a bus or news helicopter went out of control. They saved cats that were stuck up in trees and helped parents with young kids evacuate when there were akuma attacks nearby. They even helped out spoiled brats and snotty liars who were getting targeted, even if they definitely didn't deserve the help.

It was one of the reasons why they were so liked, really. Paris' superheroes weren't aloof or cold or focused only on their job and their job alone. They went out of their way to reach out and make sure that people were okay.

….but even the most patient of superheroes had their limits. There were only so many times that Ladybug could put up with Chloe's clinging and endless babble when, despite Chloe's assurances, she had definitely done something to tick the unfortunate akumatized person off and therefore entirely deserved to be the target of their ire. And really, trying to help Lila at all during akuma attacks was a waste of effort, since she seemed determined to fake injuries and try to distract them. But it was still expected that they at least try to help, because- well, they were superheroes.

Still, being a superhero didn't necessarily mean having superhuman patience. And even though it was still early in the morning- they hadn't even finished homeroom yet- Lila was already wearing Marinette's patience thin.

Really, it was an impressive accomplishment, considering that Lila was "out of town" on one of her mother's "trips" and therefore not even physically in the classroom. But she had video-called in first thing after homeroom started to give an overly saccharine-sweet "recounting" of what she had been up to the previous few days. This time she was calling from "the fjords of Finland, I wish you guys could be here because it is gorgeous!" and prattling on about some princess that she had supposedly met and was discussing charity work with.

Marinette could not envision anything being a bigger waste of time. They could be catching up on curriculum that had gotten behind because of akuma attacks, but nope, no such luck. Instead, they were listening to Lila's completely made-up and not at all relevant stories and wasting their entire homeroom period. Lila had been yammering on for over forty-five minutes now, and showed no sign of stopping.

(Also, Marinette had some serious questions about how Lila was supposedly getting enough internet to support the call while on a hill overlooking one of the most spectacular of the Finnish fjords, which was decidedly not close to any sort of civilization.)

At least Marinette had started bringing projects to school to work on during their calls with Lila. If they couldn't use their time productively for schoolwork during homeroom, then she would take the chance to get some of her other work done. Maybe Ms. Bustier frowned on it, but. Well. Marinette had more or less ceased to care. She had too much to get done to be too concerned with what did or didn't bother her teacher, particularly when what she was doing wasn't hurting anyone.

"So I'll be out for the rest of this week and maybe a couple days next week," Lila chirped at long last, beaming at them. "Depending on whether I can persuade Princess Sophia to join Prince Ali and I on our global campaign to end pollution! I'll keep you all updated!"

The entire class exploded with assurances, everyone hastening to tell Lila that they were sure that she would be able to get the princess to help, and how amazing it was that she was doing such great work, and how everybody was sure to pitch in and help her get caught back up on her schoolwork once she returned to Paris. Lila basked in the attention, gushing about how kind everyone was and how lucky she was to get placed in what had to be the world's nicest class.

Which of course meant a whole new round of people telling Lila that she was nice and kind and fantastic, too.

Barf.

Finally, finally, Lila signed off after another few rounds of back-and-forth gushing. Marinette let out a sigh of relief, plenty glad that she wouldn't have to listen to Lila's humble-bragging for another couple days. The far-fetched stories that Lila had been spinning- seriously, how were people believing that Lila had somehow saved a beloved prized cow herd with only the help of their traditional decorative cowbells- had been grating on her nerves.

Cows with decorate cowbells wasn't even a Finnish thing. Somehow, Lila (and everyone else in the class, with the sole exception of Adrien) had forgotten that that was a Swiss tradition.

It was probably too much to expect that Lila would actually pay any attention to details like that. For her, differences between countries and cultures were probably annoying little details that she didn't feel like bothering with.

"Well, we won't be doing anything as exciting as discussing anti-pollution plans with a princess today, but we do have plenty of other things to cover," Ms. Bustier announced as soon as the call ended, glancing up at the clock. "We're actually running a little behind schedule in Literature, so let's use the last, ah, three minutes of homeroom to try to get a bit of a head start so we won't have to have as much make-up homework this weekend!"

Marinette could only sigh and hope that the rest of the day wouldn't be so incredibly exasperating.

Because right now? She didn't feel like being very helpful at all.

By the time news of an akuma out and about reached the school in the early afternoon, Marinette was almost relieved at the excuse to leave for a bit. It seemed like everywhere she turned, people were talking about Lila's latest so-called adventures- so much for not having to put up with it for at least a couple more days- and speculating about what new royal support might mean for Lila's campaign. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Ms. Bustier had pulled Marinette to the side between classes to tell her off for her obvious disinterest during Lila's video call, so Marinette's mood had slid even further downhill.

And now? Well, she was in the mood to work out some of her frustrations on Hawkmoth's latest minion.

But not too obviously, of course. People would wonder if they saw her punch an akuma's face in, just because she was pretending that it was Lila's. Besides, whoever was under the akumatization was a victim, as she and Chat Noir were always reminding the press and the people that akumas had targeted. They weren't in control of what they were doing.

(Well. Mostly. There had been some exceptions, largely consisting of Lila, but proving that enough to be able to persuade anyone in power was a bit difficult. On top of that, once the first accusation of on-purpose collusion with Hawkmoth stuck, then- well, it could easily turn into a slippery slope lined with baseless accusations from people out looking for revenge.)

Though to be fair, it honestly seemed as though this particular akuma completely deserved whatever beating Ladybug gave her. Best-Laid Plans seemed entirely entitled, screaming in fury whenever her "foolproof" plots to capture Ladybug and Chat Noir were defeated and yelling about how dare they not fall fire her traps, how dare they not believe whatever she said, how dare they laugh at how (laughably) easy and transparent her so-called complex plans to catch them were.

Honestly, she and Lila would probably get along fantastically. Both of them had some serious delusions of grandeur.

"I can't figure out how she thinks these things are foolproof and complex when she can't spend more than a couple minutes seeing them up," Chat Noir said as he yanked the side off of another "hidden" cage and chucked it off to the side so that it wouldn't pose them any danger. "They're impulsive and showy but lack any real substance."

Best-Laid Plans let out another screech of fury. "Stop making fun of them, they're foolproof!"

"Right, because even fools would be safe from them!" Ladybug yelled back. "Because they fool no one!"

"How dare you, I learned how to make traps from an expert in Bolivia! You're just getting lucky!"

"She does realize that claiming that doesn't somehow make it true, right?" Ladybug sighed, utterly exasperated. They had wasted half an hour already, and she really wasn't in the mood for another half hour of this nonsense. "Lucky Charm!"

A bottle of soap dropped into her hand. Ladybug sighed, then glanced around as she and Chat Noir sprinted after Best-Laid Plans. She was heading up, up, up the Eiffel Tower, fast but not fast enough to outrun the superheroes.

"There's another trap there," Chat Noir pointed out as they leapt up another level. "I bet she's planning on pushing us in."

An idea clicked in Ladybug's mind. Of course! "She's going to stop on the next platform- hit the soap bottle right at her as we pass, hard enough for it to split! And- now!"

It was practically a work of art, really. Ladybug tossed her Lucky Charm at Chat Noir, who hit it at just the right time. Sudsy pink soap sprayed across the platform, completely coating it. The split bottle and what little soap remained in it slammed into Best-Laid Plans' face, sending her staggering right into the slippery puddle of soap.

And she slid, cursing up a storm, right off the edge of the platform and neatly into the trap she had set up below.

"Well, would you look at that," Chat Noir said cheerfully as he and Ladybug swung down to land next to the soap-covered Best-Laid Plans. "Your traps can catch one person, at least! So they're not entirely fool-proofed after all."

Ladybug nearly choked on her laughter as she snagged Best-Laid Plans' cell phone, snapping it in half and catching the butterfly that fluttered free. The akuma only glared, furious but unable to do anything with the ropes of her trap twisted around her arms and keeping them bound.

Really, it was art.

After a moment's pause to appreciate the sight a little more, Ladybug snagged the remnants of the soap bottle with her yo-yo and tossed them into the air. "Miraculous Ladybug!"

The glittering swarm rushed around the city, wiping away all of the destroyed traps and putting things back to normal. Once everything else was fixed, the light swept around Best-Laid Plans and left a sulking Lila Rossi in her place.

Somehow, Ladybug was not entirely surprised.

"Surprise," Chat Noir sighed, rolling his eyes as he stepped up to her side. "Gee, and wasn't she meant to be out of the country right now?"

Deep in Ladybug's brain, there was a distinct aha as an idea was born, and Ladybug pounced on it. Pasting on her best friendly-helpful-neighborhood-superhero look, she approached Lila, who only looked more sour.

"You must have been really upset about whatever plans didn't quite work out!" Ladybug told her, trying her best to sound sympathetic instead of smug. "It's always disappointing when things don't work out the way we want them to, but it's rarely the end of the world!"

Chat Noir nodded seriously, only the twitching corners of his lips giving away the fact that he was maybe not quite as sincere as he was pretending to be. "Exactly! If we miss a movie, there's always another viewing. If we can't go out with friends, there's always another day. It's not worth getting too upset about, because then we miss out on other stuff. I'd say just let it go and move on with the rest of your day."

Lila looked mutinous. Ladybug had to assume that whatever plans had been foiled hadn't exactly been the sort that could just be picked up and done another day. "Uh-huh."

"Chat Noir is right," Ladybug said immediately in her perkiest voice, cheerfully ignoring Lila's deepening scowl. "It's best not to linger too much over plans that didn't work out and just go back to your normal day instead. In fact, to help you get back to your normal day, I'll even give you a free ride back to school, so you don't miss even more class! You're at Collège Françoise Dupont, right?"

Without waiting for an answer, Ladybug grabbed Lila and hoisted her over her shoulder before the other girl could realize what was going on and object. She and Chat Noir were usually more careful when carrying civilians- after all, the over the shoulder carry wasn't very comfortable- but she definitely wasn't keeping Lila in any position where she could make a grab for her earrings. "See you, Chat Noir!"

Chat Noir waved back, looking suspiciously like he was struggling to not double over laughing. "See you, Ladybug!"

With that, Ladybug was off, jumping off of the Eiffel Tower and letting herself do a free-fall for perhaps a little longer than she normally would before casting out her yo-yo and swinging at top speed towards the school.

She really couldn't tell if Lila's screaming was in fear or in anger.

It took almost no time at all for the school to draw near, and Ladybug did some hasty calculations to figure out where to go- her class should still be in Literature, though they would be switching pretty soon- before aiming right at the window Ms. Bustier had opened earlier in the day and dropping neatly in.

"Ta-da, back in class!" Ladybug announced cheerfully, dumping Lila back on her feet with perhaps a little more force than necessary. Lila staggered and nearly fell before catching herself. "And it looks like they managed to start up class again after you got akumatized! That's good, I know that sometimes after people get akumatized in school, the whole day just gets entirely disrupted. And I'm sure you wouldn't want to be the cause of your class falling behind on their work!" She sent the class a smile, then jumped straight back out the window with a wave. As soon as she did, the class exploded with noise, confusion clearly reigning supreme.

Ladybug only smiled.

By the time Marinette slipped back into the classroom, there was such mayhem going on that no one noticed her come in. Lila had clearly tried to spin a new story to cover why Ladybug had brought her to class- and how she had gotten akumatized when she was meant to be several countries away- but this time, no one was buying it.

In fact, Marinette noticed as she slipped back to her seat, Mr. Damocles had already been called in and was currently punching a number into his phone. No doubt Lila's mom was being called now that there was solid evidence that that Lila had not been where she was supposed to be. It was definitely long overdue, honestly, but better late than not at all.

Adrien slid into his seat a minute later with a politely puzzled look on his face, apparently having missed the commotion with a poorly-timed bathroom visit. He caught sight of Marinette, pretty much the only other student still sitting in her spot, and raised a curious eyebrow.

"Lila got akumatized and Ladybug was being helpful and brought her back to class," Marinette whispered, unable to hide her grin. "And, well…"

"Now she's in trouble because clearly she wasn't in Finland," Adrien finished. He grinned back. "Somehow I suspect that Ladybug might have known that Lila hadn't been in class in the first place."

Marinette bit back a tart I don't know what you're talking about before she could give herself away. She wasn't sure why Adrien would suspect that Ladybug would know about Lila's lie about not being in the country, but- well, maybe it was because he had seen Ladybug call Lila out before, and it wasn't exactly normal for her and Chat Noir to return civilians to wherever they had been at the start of the fight.. They only did it for young kids, really, and only if they had enough time left before they detransformed.

So maybe she hadn't been very subtle, so sue her. But at least now Lila wouldn't be able to carry out whatever no doubt nefarious plan that she had been dreaming up. It had already then thwarted once, and Ladybug hadn't been about to let Lila take another swing at it, despite what she and Chat Noir had said about trying again.

"Hopefully she won't get akumatized again," Adrien added after a minute. Up in the front, Lila was in full meltdown mode, but no one seemed particularly inclined to comfort her. Mr. Damocles had clearly gotten through to Lila's mom and had retreated to the corner to try to hold a conversation uninterrupted by the commotion. "I mean, Ladybug and Chat Noir have already fought her today, I'm sure they don't want to again." He grimaced. "I'd hope that Hawkmoth would be tired of her by now, but considering how many times Mr. Pigeon has showed up, that….might be too much to hope for."

Marinette made a face at that. True, another Lila akumatization would be less than ideal, but on the bright side, if she got akumatized at school, then hopefully classes would be canceled for the afternoon and no one would notice her missing. Besides, well… "I'm sure they'd rather just deal with her being akumatized again today than being akumatized several dozen more times in the next couple months, because she is totally on track to do that."

"Ooh, good point."

"And honestly, if anyone is going to get akumatized today, I would guess that it would be one of our classmates," Marinette added, glancing around. People were clearly ticked off about the lies Lila had told, with all of the connections that she had promised and the "industry advice" that she had given people getting their hopes up. Now those hopes were dashed, and people had to come to terms with the fact that someone who they thought was a friend- a friend that they had gone out of their way to help more than a few times- had been outright lying to them to manipulate them. That had to stink, and she was sure that some people would be particularly upset. "Oh, poor Rose. She looks like she's about to cry."

"And Alya looks like she's about to commit a murder," Adrien added. There was an edge of laughter to his voice. "But she's still filming, at least."

Marinette looked and had to try not to laugh herself. It seemed like Alya was torn between chewing Lila out and getting her scoop, so she had combined the two in what could only be described as an accusatory interview given in a yell with less-than-flattering angles.

Well. Whatever made her feel better, she supposed.

"All right class, that's enough!" Ms. Bustier finally yelled over the noise. Mr. Damocles had clearly given up on making his phone call in the room and had fled. "Everyone, to your seats, we're going to continue class as normal until further notice- yes, that includes you too, Lila. Just borrow some paper and a pencil, since you didn't come prepared. And now, back to the lesson-"

Marinette exchanged a grin with Adrien as slowly, everyone filtered back to their seats. Most people were clearly in a state of shock still, but others were whispering, comparing stories and trying to figure out where they had missed the signs where things didn't quite line up. The gossip and speculation continued even as Ms. Bustier resolutely tried to forge on with her lesson, questions about what had happened reigning supreme.

The rest of the story came out less than an hour later, during an easily-overheard shouting match between Lila and her mom inside of Mr. Damocles' office.

As it turned out, Lila hadn't intended to get akumatized at all this time around. She had gotten so upset partway through the day because she had gotten an email- an email that should have been sent to her mom, but apparently the email on file was Lila's instead- that said that, given her test scores and the absolute piles of unreturned makeup work from during her trips, the school would not be able to approve any further travels for the rest of the school year and- even worse- she was in serious danger of having to repeat the grade. She had been furious- there was no real way for her to lie her way out of that- and, well, the rest was history.

And Lila was soon to be history, if Alix was to be believed. She had managed to keep hiding nearby after the rest of the class was busted for skipping class and eavesdropping, and had caught more of the fight. Lila's mom was removing her from Paris effective immediately- apparently she had a very strict aunt and uncle back in Italy who would be willing to take her until either Mrs. Rossi could be transferred to a different embassy or Hawkmoth was no longer an issue. In fact, because of Hawkmoth, Lila was going to be sent back to Italy that evening, before she could get akumatized again.

Marinette honestly couldn't be more relieved about that. Lila's akuma forms tended towards the difficult and more indirect than a lot of other akumas, and she got akumatized often. With her gone- and with the class relieved that Lila was getting properly punished for lying to them- the chance of more Lila-related akumas was steadily dropping.

"What I think is funny is that, if Ladybug hadn't done anything, Lila still wouldn't have lasted much longer," Marinette told Tikki as she headed home after school, completely unable to hide the spring in her step. "She wouldn't have been able to go on any more 'trips' and Mr. Damocles would definitely have to reach her mom about the whole being held back thing, so all of the lies would have come out. Ladybug just sped it up." She grinned. "And maybe it was a bit fun to see everyone's reactions." She paused. "...and maybe it was a bit fun to get my revenge, too."

Tikki giggled too, clearly amused. "I bet it was pretty funny to see everyone's faces! And at least now you don't have to worry about Lila anymore. I bet that people will forget about her pretty quickly once she's gone."

"I hope so." Marinette glanced back at the school before she stepped into the bakery. More people than normal were still lingering, no doubt gossiping about everything that had happened and trying to come to terms with the betrayal. Her class was resilient, though, and they would move on. Maybe there would be some lingering disappointment about the hopes and dreams they had pinned on Lila's lies, but it would fade with time.

After all, Lila Rossi wasn't worth their time or energy.

#Miraculous Ladybug #My writing #marinette dupain cheng #adrien agreste

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innovativelanguagelearning · 4 years

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Avoid these 5 Common Mistakes Made by Beginners

If you’ve had a negative experience learning a new language at one point and time, don’t let that discourage you from trying again. The truth is that learning any language is never easy, but it’s definitely possible. Sometimes the difference between success and failure has less to do with your abilities or talents, and a lot more to do with the way you look at things.

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1. Listen before you speak

Being slow to speak and quick to listen is good life advice whether or not you’re learning a foreign language. Effective listening is essential to communication. As a beginner there is a tendency to concentrate so much on what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it, that you can completely miss the meaning or heart of what the other person is trying to communicate.

Not only will this impair your ability to listen in your target language, but it will also stall what little conversation you had going. Remember that conversations are a two-way street. If you’re speaking more than listening then you actually have more of a monologue on your hands rather than a dialogue.

The inputs of language learning, listening, and reading, are just as important as the outputs, speaking and writing. For beginners, inputs are even more crucial, as they are the main way you acquire new vocabulary. I’ll even go so far to say that for new students the best method for learning involves more listening than it does speaking. Though that may change with higher proficiency levels.

2. Don’t be embarrassed when you do speak

Peoples' next mistake usually comes from the other side of the spectrum, where new learners are too scared or embarrassed to contribute to a conversation. The fear of making mistakes and embarrassing yourself can paralyze your language learning.

It’s vital to remember that everyone makes mistakes. Even native speakers had to find their way through the language when they were children.

Making mistakes while learning a new language is inevitable, but it’s also a good thing. The faster you make mistakes, the quicker you can correct them and move on with your learning. So instead of being afraid to make mistakes, try looking at them as steps toward progress. In reality that’s what they really are.

3. Don’t major on minors

If taken in all at once a new language can feel overwhelming to learn. It’s so easy to get discouraged by all your little mistakes and conversational mishaps that you lose sight of the progress you’re making. In addition to mistakes you’ll also come across plateaus, where you study and practice consistently but don’t see any results for a significant amount of time. But whether you face errors or plateaus remember that these things are minor obstacles on the road to fluency.

Your biggest obstacle always is not to give up and stick with it.

If you stay persistent your mistakes will be corrected and your abilities will improve, but if you slow down or throw in the towel completely; then you will either subvert your progress or nix it altogether. So remember that as long as you’re still studying and learning the language you can’t lose.

It might feel like you’re losing the battle for language learning for a little while but hang in there.

A practical way to help you stay motivated is to make small weekly goals. Research shows that goal-setting has a significant impact on learning. Try picking one aspect of grammar or a collection of new words or phrases to study for the next 7 days. At the end of the week check your progress and measure your success. Setting little benchmarks like this will give you a rightful sense of accomplishment.

4. Remember that immersion isn’t magical

A lot of people think that by moving to a foreign country they will learn the language by osmosis.

But whether you learn abroad or at home you still need to study and practice the language. Living in a new country gives you way more opportunities to do this than staying at home, but if you don’t consciously take advantage of these opportunities while living abroad it won’t benefit your language learning.

If you’re an expat living in a foreign country there is a natural inclination to hang around other expats. Learning a language and living in a foreign culture is hard and uncomfortable.

For better or worse we’re often drawn to the easier road. If you made the decision to study abroad then you want to hang out with native speaking people as much as possible. You have the rest of your life to be with people who speak your language. This doesn’t mean ignoring your expat friends. Just be sure that you’re giving proper attention to your language learning.

5. Be open-minded

Languages are better lived than they are learned.

When learning Turkish your English speaking brain will want to confirm the new grammar and vocabulary to your native language norms and grammar rules. Ignore your brain on this one. At first you might feel completely wrong saying a sentence that is in fact correct. After a certain point in language learning there is a switch that goes off, when your brain finally realizes that you’re not speaking your native language but a new one altogether. This could take a while though, especially if this is your first time learning a new language. Until then do what you know is correct even if it feels a bit weird when you say it.

The same goes for culture. Just as you want to open to the differences in the language, don’t forget to be open to the differences in the culture too.

I hope this post helped you shift your thinking and approach learning language in a way that will help you become fluent faster. And that you’ll learn to enjoy the journey toward fluency and savor the language for its own sake, that’s probably the biggest language learning secret there is!

And for even more ways to get started learning a new language the right way check out our complete language learning program. Sign up for your free lifetime account by clicking on the link in the description. Get tons of resources to have you speaking in your target language.

#onlinelanguage #learnitalian #learnenglish #learnspanish #learnjapanese #learnkorean #learnchinese #onlinelanguagelearning #onlinelearning #learnalanguage #beginnersmistakes

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cheese-greater-official · 4 years

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The Great Gatsby .. I think antibucci Summary: Literally just the great Gatsby. Nothing else here. Absolutely no changes. Definitely use this for class, or reference. The Great Gatsby is public domain now after all. Anyways here's the totally unaltered and complete book of the Great Gatsby. I swear nothing was changed, most definitely. Of course credit to F Scott Fitzgerald for writing this commentary on both his life and the world he was in. A lot of this can still relate today, so keep an open mind when reading. Notes: I'd like to preface this by saying... This is really I mean REALLY just the Great Gatsby. I swear. There is nothing going here that is out of the ordinary! Nothing at all! Chapter 1 Chapter Text Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!” - Thomas Parke D'Invilliers. 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 any one,” 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 to-day. 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 centre 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 weather-beaten 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 Maecenas 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

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 eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, 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 anti-climax. 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 off shore. "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 eyes 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 men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me. "Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically. "The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore." "How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby." "I'd like to." "She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?" "Never." "Well, you ought to see her. She's—" Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. "What you doing, Nick

?" "I'm a bond man." "Who with?" I told him. "Never heard of them," he remarked decisively. This annoyed me. "You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East." "Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else." At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room. "I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember." "Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon." "No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training." Her host looked at her incredulously. "You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me." I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before. "You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there." "I don't know a single—" "You must know Gatsby." "Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?" Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square. Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind. "Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed. "All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?" Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger. "Look!" she complained. "I hurt it." We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue. "You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—" "I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding." "Hulking," insisted Daisy. Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself. "You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?" I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way. "Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The

Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?" "Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone. "Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—" "Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things." "We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun. "You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair. "This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?" There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me. "I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" "That's why I came over tonight." "Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—" "Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker. "Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position." 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 dusk. The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing. "I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?" This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house. Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether. "This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said. "Don't talk. I want to hear what happens." "Is something happening?" I inquired innocently. "You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew." "I don't." "Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York." "Got some woman?" I repeated blankly. Miss Baker nodded. "She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?" Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table. "It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety. She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked

outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?" "Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables." The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police. The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee. Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl. "We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding." "I wasn't back from the war." "That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything." Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. "I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything." "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?" "Very much." "It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." "You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!" The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday Evening Post"—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms. When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand. "To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table,

"in our very next issue." Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up. "Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed." "Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester." "Oh,—you're Jordan Baker." I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago. "Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you." "If you'll get up." "I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon." "Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—" "Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word." "She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way." "Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly. "Her family." "Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her." Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence. "Is she from New York?" I asked quickly. "From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—" "Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—" "Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me. I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called "Wait! "I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West." "That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you were engaged." "It's libel. I'm too poor." "But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We heard it from three people so it must be true." Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage. Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in

his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. Chapter 2 Summary: Just chapter 2 of the Great Gatsby Notes: (See the end of the chapter for notes.) Chapter Text About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. "We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl." I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred

to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. "Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?" "I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell me that car?" "Next week; I've got my man working on it now." "Works pretty slow, don't he?" "No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all." "I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant—" His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: "Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down." "Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. "I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train." "All right." "I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level." She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track. "Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. "Awful." "It does her good to get away." "Doesn't her husband object?" "Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive." So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. "I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to have—a dog." We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed. "What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. "All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?" "I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?" The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. "That's no police dog," said Tom. "No, it's not exactly a police dog,"

" said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with catching cold." "I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?" "That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten dollars." The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. "Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately. "That dog? That dog's a boy." "It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it." We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner. "Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here." "No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?" "Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know." "Well, I'd like to, but—" We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. "I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too." The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle" lay on the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed i

Feel free to delete the first one. I would do anything for you if post this. The Great Gatsby in all it’s glory

im aware i was probably supposed to read the whole thing to find out if you changed anything and tnhen find out you hadnt and id wasted an hour of my life but i am way too lazy to do that

#ask #im not gonna post the other one merely because of how bad i feel for my followers #long post

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quixotic-writer · 3 years

Text

The Impractical Gattosby: Chapter 1

~Oh???? My god???? This was fucking INCREDIBLE!!!! Thank you for this spectacular submission! I’m truly blown away! Please please PLEASE post this on AO3 or Wattpad because I want you properly credited with this work and I want so many others to read this!

In Murr’s younger and more vulnerable years his father gave him some advice that he’s been turning over in his mind ever since.

“James, whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told him, “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 they’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and he understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence he is inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to Murr and also made him 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 at college, Murr was unjustly accused of being a ferret, because he was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently he has feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when Murr 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. He is still a little afraid of missing something if he forgot that, as his father snobbishly suggested, and Murr would snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of his tolerance, Murr came 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 he didn’t care what it’s founded on. When he came back from Staten Island last autumn he felt that he wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; he wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gattosby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from Murr’s reaction—Joe Gattosby who represented everything for which Murr has 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 “comedic genius"—it was an extraordinary gift for confidence, a type of shamelessness such as Murr has never found in any other person and which it is not likely he should ever find again. No—Gattosby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gattosby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out his interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Murr’s family were prominent, well-to-do people in the northeast for three generations. The Murrays are something of a clan and they have a tradition that they’ve descended from Italian and Irish nobility, but the actual founder of his line was his grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale business that Murr’s father carries on today.

He never saw this great-uncle but he’s supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office, sporting a shiny bald head. Murr graduated from Georgetown University in 1915, and after he decided to go to New York and learn the motion picture industry. Everybody he knew was in the motion picture industry so he supposed it could support one more single man. All his aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for him and finally said, “Why—ye-es” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance him for a year, using the funds that would have otherwise gone towards purchasing for him an automobile, and after various delays he went to New York, permanently, he thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and he had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that they take an apartment together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the place, a weather beaten cardboard apartment at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Los Angeles and he went out to the country alone. Murr had a dog, Penny, at least he had her for a few days until she ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made his 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 Murr, stopped him on the road.

“How do you get to Staten Island?” he asked helplessly.

Murr told him. And as he walked on he was lonely no longer. Murr was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on him 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—he 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. Murr bought a dozen volumes on motion pictures and cameras and they stood on his shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and Rudolph Valentino knew. And he had the high intention of reading many other books besides. He was rather literary in college—not only was he an English major, but one year Murr wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the “Georgetown News"—and now he was going to bring back all such things into his 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 he rented an apartment 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 boroughs, identical in contour and separated only by water, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Upper New York Bay.

Murr lived at Staten Island, the—well, the less fashionable of the two boroughs, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. His apartment was at the very tip of the island, only fifty yards from the Bay, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on his 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 Gattosby’s mansion. Or rather, as he didn’t know Mr. Joe Gattosby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. His own apartment was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so he had a view of the water, a partial view of his neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable Brooklyn glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening he took the Staten Island Ferry there to have dinner with the Vulcano-Quinns. Sal Vulcano was his former brother-in-law from when Murr had married Sal’s sister for three days, and he’d known Brian “Q” Quinn in his Monsignor Farrell High School days.

Sal’s husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever worked for the Fire Department of New York—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 anti-climax. His family was enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d come to Brooklyn in a fashion that rather took one’s breath away: for instance he’d bought three cats named Benjamin, Brooklyn, and Chessie. It was hard to realize that a man in Murr’s own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came to New York, Murr doesn’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 Sal over the telephone, but Murr didn’t believe it—he had no sight into Sal’s heart but he felt that Q would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable fire to fight.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening he rode the Staten Island Ferry over to Brooklyn to see two old friends whom he scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than Murr had 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 Brian Quinn was at the front porch.

He had changed since his Monsignor Farrell High years. Now he was a sturdy, dark-haired man of thirty with a rather magnificent beard and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant hazel eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his newsboy cap and silk American-flag print scarf 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 guys at high school 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.” They were in the same Improv Club, and while they were never intimate Murr always had the impression that Q approved of him and wanted him to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

They 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 off shore.

“It belonged to Mrs. Calabash, my neighbor.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”

They 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 men were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their clothes were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. Murr 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 Q shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two men ballooned slowly to the floor.

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

The other man, Sal, made an attempt to rise—he leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then he laughed, a loud boisterous laugh that soon had him falling to the floor, and he laughed too and came forward into the room.

“Oh my gawd, I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.”

He got up to only laugh and almost fell to the floor once again, as if he said something very witty, and held his hand for a moment, looking up into Murr’s face, promising that there was no one in the world he so much wanted to see. That was a way he had. Sal hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing man was Jost. (Murr has heard it said that Sal’s murmur was only to make people lean toward him; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Casey Jost’s lips fluttered, he nodded at Murr almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped his head back again—the object he was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given him something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to Murr’s lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from him.

Murr looked back at his former brother-in-law who began to ask him questions in his 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. His face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright green eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in his voice that men who had cared for him found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that he had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

#submission #suki speaks #and also the submission name was F. Thot Fitzgerald which SENT ME INTO ORBIT I LOVED EVERY BIT OF THIS #anon

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galaxierowls · 4 years

Note

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you!"

—THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS

Chapter 1

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 any one," 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 weather beaten 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 Maecenas 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 eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, 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 anti-climax. 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.

"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.

"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 eyes 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 men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore."

"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."

"I'd like to."

"She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's—"

Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else."

At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

Her host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there."

"I don't know a single—"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

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

"Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—"

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?"

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over tonight."

"Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position."

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 dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?"

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?"

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"

"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables."

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

"I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

Thank you.

#she speaks #ria ur so funny

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