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bridgertonbabe · 2 years ago

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As much as I love every one of the benophie boys, I think william might be my favorite(in your hc worlds) I just love how mischievous yet lovable he can, so it would be great if we got an older teen/adult william drabble! Thank you for the writing btw, I know how hard a creative block can be and just know were just grateful for anything we can get in this tiny Fandom! So take as long as you need we can wait!

I just wanted to say thank you for being so supportive and understanding. I've been on the struggle bus creatively for a while now and it's been very frustrating because I sincerely want to write and update my works and be productive but my writer's block has just left me in a rut. Back in the summer I had all these plans to write a bunch of stuff in the lead up to Christmas, to be churning stuff out thick and fast and creating plenty of content but alas that hasn't come to fruition. I've had asks enquiring when I'll next be updating any one of my works or curious if I'd be contributing any holiday-related content and I've felt so guilty for not being able to provide an answer purely because hell I didn't have an answer for myself. So it's very kind and reassuring to receive these asks of people being understanding and I just wanted to say it really means a lot and I greatly appreciate it.

With that all being said, William is always fun to write for, due to how much of a fun lil shit he is. Here's a lil festive drabble set in the Teachers AU in which William continues to be the biggest stressor in his father's life;

Benedict loved all his four children with every fibre in his being. Charlie and Alex had both recently graduated university, both of them hard-working and dedicated in their pursuits in life, and Violet was perfect in every which way just like her mother, and William... well, William was William.

By no means did he love William any less. William was as much of a blessing in Benedict's life as Charlie, Alex, and Violet were and there wasn't anything he wouldn't do for his youngest son - but with that being said, William was the most notorious child in the entire Bridgerton family and his constant naughty antics was single-handedly the biggest source of grief in Benedict's life and had been ever since William had begun walking and talking.

All year round William caused chaos, but he particularly upped the ante during the Christmas season. When he was three years old his biggest mission was to push over their Christmas tree which he successfully managed to do multiple times that year, leaving Benedict to put it back up again and again and again. A couple of years later Benedict had discovered his young daughter crying in a sealed up cardboard box by the front door after William decided he wanted a different sister and had packaged her up in the hopes that Santa could trade her for a new one. During his years at infant and primary school whenever he participated in a Nativity play or Christmas concert he'd take the opportunity to loudly cry out a new word he had learnt that year, vocabulary which had included; penis, anus, fuck, and (most infamously of all after his teacher had welcomed the parents to the concert) nonce. One year he had preyed on Violet's fear of the elf on the shelf and kept moving the elf to unsettle and freak her out all the time before topping off his reign of terror when Violet opened her wardrobe and found William dressed up like the elf and giving her a sinister stare, causing her to scream and go running to Benedict and be left so frightened that she spent the following week sleeping in her parents bed.

Benedict had hoped that as William grew up that he might be capable of maturing - but he thought wrong. A running gag that had stretched on for years was a present being left underneath the tree for Violet with the tag claiming it was from her "real father", with William "accidentally" letting slip that Violet was the result of an extra-marital affair. On the first year he had pulled that stunt an inconsolable Violet had to be assured that of course Benedict was her real father and that her parents loved each other very much and would never cheat on each other. In spite of the upset he had caused, William continued the bit year in and year out, elevating it to now include Sophie receiving jewellery from her supposed lover, much to Benedict's chagrin.

So of course once the festive season came around again, while others were stressed with Christmas shopping and hosting their family during the holiday, Benedict Bridgerton's Yuletide stress was totally and utterly as a result of the dread he felt from whatever it was his eighteen year old son had up his sleeve.

"What's he pulled this year?" Michael asked.

It was Christmas Day and the whole Bridgerton family was celebrating together, the first time they had done so for a couple of years, what with Anthony, Colin, and Francesca celebrating with their in-laws during the previous Christmases. Dinner had just been finished and everyone was spread out across the large home Violet and Edmund resided in. While everyone else was enjoying the festivities, Benedict was keeping a constant eye on his youngest son to see what he would do.

"Nothing yet." Benedict replied. "Which makes me only more worried."

So far the only things William had done were return from his first uni term with newly dyed red hair and white frosted tips ("tis the season" had been his shrugged explanation), as well as send a Christmas card pretending to be Sophie's make-believe lover in which he begged her to run away with him and bring Violet too so they could finally be a family. Benedict just knew that there was more to come. William simply couldn't plateau his typical Christmas shenanigans like that.

"So no gifts for shock-value underneath the tree this year?" Colin asked.

He was referring to Christmases gone by in which Alex had once unwrapped a copy of Oedipus Rex, leading to both Alex and Charlie to whack William around the head for being gross for what he was implying, as well as another Christmas in which Charlie had unwrapped a present that had resulted in Benedict shouting on Christmas morning; "YOU ARE FOURTEEN YEARS OLD! WHY THE HELL ARE YOU BUYING A FLESHLIGHT FOR YOUR BROTHER?!"

"Fortunately not." Benedict said through gritted teeth.

"Shit. You think he's going to pull something here?" Eloise wondered.

Typically if William was suspiciously low-key on Christmas morning at home, it meant he had something dastardly planned for the day spent with the extended family. The most infamous incident had been the Christmas when the fire brigade had been called out after he had set off a fireworks in the living room - it was the most mortified and stressed Benedict had ever been because of his youngest son.

He gave a small nod to confirm Eloise's suspicion, his eyes still firmly fixed on William, who noticed his father's stare and sent a disarming wink back at him.

"What do you think he's got planned?" Michael asked.

"I have no idea. All I know is that he's plotting something."

Since returning from uni William had been curiously quiet and Benedict had come across him having hushed conversations on the phone as well as sneaking out of the house everyday and slipping back in later on. He truly couldn't fathom what it was that William had concocted this year and even dwelling on what he could have come up with was putting Benedict on edge.

Suddenly there was the jingling of bells and everyone's attention was brought to William, who had stood up with said bells in his hand.

"Hey everyone! If you could all gather round. There's a little something I've prepared which I hope everyone will enjoy." he announced.

"Oh god, oh god, oh god." Benedict fretted, already holding his head in his hand, dreading what exactly his son was about to do in front of everyone.

What if he had gone to the extreme lengths of hiring an actor and bringing him along to introduce as Violet’s real father? Or what if he was going for something far more simple than that and simply drop his trousers to moon everyone in the room? When it came to William, the terrifying possibilities were endless.

"Now if all the cousins don't mind assembling." William motioned to the front of the living room by the fire place.

Much to Benedict's confusion, all of his nieces and nephews, as well as his other three children all followed William's instruction, and all of them were smirking, giggling, and nudging each other as they convened together.

"Wait; has he roped them all in on it this year?" Colin frowned.

"Oh fuck." Benedict groaned - he wouldn't have been surprised if William had convinced other mischief-makers like Charlotte, Oliver, and Amanda to help him with whatever he had planned, and he could see William's younger cousins being influenced and following his lead, but the fact he had roped in his older cousins, his more mature and level-headed cousins, and even Violet had left Benedict flabbergasted.

"And if you oldies would like to sit yourselves down." William addressed to his grandparents, aunts, and uncles with a cheeky grin.

"No, no, no, no." Benedict was muttering under his breath has his parents, siblings, and in-laws began sitting down on the sofas and chairs facing the younger generation.

"Ben. Ben? Look at me." Sophie had appeared and reached out a hand to his cheek. "It's fine. It's going to be fine, okay?" she tried reassuring him. "Charlie, Alex, and Violet wouldn't go along with anything bad now would they?"

"But what if he's blackmailing them?" Benedict hissed. "What if he's blackmailing all of the ones who wouldn't normally go along with it?"

"Honey, I don't think William has that much influence."

"Hey, mum?" William called out. "Could you save telling dad you're leaving him for a few minutes please?"

"Now, William!" his grandmother warned with the shake of her head.

"Apologies, Old Violet." William smirked, using the nickname his grandmother abhorred and received an unimpressed glare from her. "Now," William beamed to the rest of the group and pulled out a conductor's baton from his sleeve, "this is dedicated to you, grandpa." he addressed his grandfather, with the family patriarch's jaw dropping in elated surprise. "This is our present to you."

William then turned back to the thirty-four other grandchildren of Violet and Edmund, clearing his throat performatively and holding his hands up ready to begin conducting.

"Oh god, oh god, oh god." Benedict muttered under his breath, bracing himself for whatever it was that his son had organized.

Sophie clutched his hand in hers to provide him comfort as much as she was trying to alleviate her own anxiety.

"And a one, and a two, and a one, two, three!" William said quietly, waving his baton before commandingly pointing it.

"Holidays are coming," the older male cousins at the back of the group began to chant, "holidays are coming, holidays are coming,"

"Tis the season!" Amanda and the Bassett girls sang when pointed to by William.

"Watch out!" the younger cousins chorused. "Look around! Something's coming, coming to town!"

"Coming to your town!" Amanda and the Basset girls chimed in again.

Benedict and Sophie's mouths both hung wide open with the ongoing harmonies and just how good it sounded. The youngest cousins were ringing bells, bouncing their knees excitedly in time with the song, and every last one of Edmund Bridgerton's grandkids had the biggest smile on their face.

"Something magic! In the night! Can't you see it? Shining bright!" they continued, all the while the older male cousins kept up the "holidays are coming" chant.

"Shining bright!" Amanda and the Basset girls as well as Katie, Charlotte, and Violet sung melodically, the last note extending as more harmonies overlapped with la la las.

Benedict and Sophie's amazement was mirrored in the faces of the rest of the older Bridgerton siblings, their partners, and Violet and Edmund as the grandchildren continued their collective choral efforts.

"Tis the season it's always the real thing!"

After a last few "holiday's are coming" William gave one last wave of his baton and the singing and jingling came to a unanimous end.

"Bravo!" Edmund jumped to his feet first, clapping madly and wearing one of the biggest smiles he had ever had on his face (which was saying a lot considering how generally smiley a person Edmund Bridgerton was). "Bravo! Bravo!"

"Oh... my god." Sophie breathed as the other adultier adults got to their feet to cheer and applaud.

Benedict stared in abject shock as William took a bow before being pulled into a crushing hug by his grandfather. He couldn't quite believe his son had done something that was entirely pure and wholesome.

Growing up Edmund had always sung the jingle to the Coca Cola Christmas advert as he served up his children Coca Cola bottles at Christmas dinner, as per their little family tradition. He had never stopped singing it over the years so naturally his grandchildren were just as familiar with the classic advert's song and got as excited as their parents did whenever the advert played or whenever their grandfather sang it to them.

"I can't believe you all planned this!" (Old) Violet remarked.

"It was actually all William's idea." Amelia said.

"Yeah he was the one who organized it entirely." Miles added.

"Oh, William, my boy!" Edmund boomed and hauled his grandson into yet another bear hug.

William? Being so thoughtful for good? To have been plotting all this time and sneaking around all in the elaborate effort of providing a sentimental surprise for his grandfather?

"Oh my god." Benedict muttered.

Hell had frozen over, pigs were flying, and by all accounts his most meddlesome son had finally turned over a new leaf.

"Wow. William really played a blinder this year." Anthony said a little later on after they had watched their father give every last grandchild a massive hug.

"I know." Benedict nodded, still in a state of disbelief.

"He really blew everyone else's presents out of the water with that." Anthony continued. "You have to hand it to him. It was unbelievably impressive."

"Daddy?"

Little Mary had come up to her father and uncle and immediately they clocked the wobble in her voice and the way her eyes were filling up with tears.

"Oh, sweetheart, what's wrong?" Anthony asked, scooping her up in his arms and cuddling her.

Mary gave a sad little sniffle. "W-W-William said that I'm only your second favourite daughter." she sobbed. "And th-that Violet's your favourite daughter and m-m-my half-sister."

Instantly Benedict heaved out a groan.

"Yeah. Yeah, there it is." he shook his head - he should have known William couldn't not be a little shit for one Christmas.

"Oh, baby, your cousin was just teasing you." Anthony comforted his daughter.

"WILLIAM!" Benedict bellowed out and marched over to his son for his regularly-programmed Christmas bollocking.

#asks #requests #teachers au #william bridgerton #benedict bridgerton #bridgerton drabble #christmas drabble #bridgerton family

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galaxierowls · 4 years ago

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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.

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."

Thank you.

#she speaks #ria ur so funny

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