《了不起的盖茨比》

The crash was just one small, vivid event in a crowded summer that otherwise centered on Nick’s quiet routine: he worked long hours at the Probity Trust, lunched with fellow clerks on cheap sausages and coffee, and had a brief fling with a Jersey City accounting clerk that fizzled when her brother started glowering at him and she left for vacation in July. He spent his evenings studying investments at the Yale Club library, then wandered New York’s streets, watching crowds head to the theatre and imagining the lives of the women he passed, feeling a quiet, shared loneliness with the other solitary young men loitering in the dusk. He reconnected with Jordan in midsummer, charmed at first by her fame as a golfer, then drawn to the guarded, curious thing she hid behind her bored, haughty expression. He learned she was incurably dishonest: she had left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down and lied about it, and had nearly been exposed for moving her ball during a high-stakes golf tournament, only saved when a caddy retracted his statement. She lied, Nick realized, to keep her cool, insolent front intact, never letting herself be at a disadvantage. He didn’t blame her deeply—dishonesty in a woman, he thought, was never a deep failing—but when she told him she hated careless people, which was why she liked him, he felt a flicker of affection, quickly tempered by the memory of the girl back home he still wrote weekly love letters to. He knew he would have to end things with Jordan before he could be free. He closed the summer with his core conviction: he was one of the few honest people he had ever known.