The Great Gatsby

at the drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had both
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
whisky 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
immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with a
girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just