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���˲�����w�ıȡ�������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 shelfin 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 Westem����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����mitation of some H.tel 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 f8shionable 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 rcmoved 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 cnds 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.��������