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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Great Gatsby
Author:     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.