The Great Gatsby

that, but you’re rude. Daisy’s sitting in there all alone.”

He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable
reproach, and, opening the door cautiously, went back into the other
room.

I walked out the back way—just as Gatsby had when he had made his
nervous circuit of the house half an hour before—and ran for a huge
black knotted tree, whose massed leaves made a fabric against the
rain. Once more it was pouring, and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by
Gatsby’s gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric
marshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except
Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church
steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the “period”
craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he’d agreed to pay
five years’ taxes on all the neighbouring cottages if the owners would
have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the
heart out of his plan to Found a Family—he went into an immediate
decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on
the door. Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have
always been obstinate about being peasantry.