October, 23, 1917
The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night. "Anyways, for an hour!"
When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen before. They were so engrossed in each other that she didn't see me until I was five feet away.
"Hello, Jordan," she called unexpectedly. "Please come here."
I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn't come that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn't lay eyes on him again for over four years — even after I'd met him on Long Island I didn't realize it was the same man.
The wind was whipping thorough her hair, but for once, the proud creature that was Daisy Fay couldn't care less for the state of her hair. Perched on the edge of her seat, the only thing Daisy was paying attention to was nothing uncommon, a lovesick young officer. The difference, between now and before, however, might not have been noticeable to those who didn't really know her. Only those who truly knew her could have seen the difference today, for it was faint. It was in her body, the way she leaned towards him, possessing him, a posture as intimate as it was innocent, and in her eyes. Eyes that drank him in, flowed along each curve and turn of his body, eyes that caressed him, held him. Eyes that had never truly looked before at someone as they were now, eyes that hinted at something different, something new. And the eyes that they were staring into with such unabashed devotion, full of an emotion that trembled and rolled like waves, the kind of emotion that young ladies of her breeding just did not have, and just did not show. It was the kind of emotion that can make or break an alliance, for that was all marriages were to her. Wedding joining together the bride and the groom, the lands of the bride and the lands of the groom, the wealths and names of two great families, families great at wealth. "Great," but the women were great just for alliances and babies, and the men to add and spend and make the name greater, more extravagant, more, more, more. Thus was, and had always been, Daisy Fay's view on her "kind," her class. She was the perfect daughter of a "perfect" class, but, as with the perfectiveness of the class, it was a perfectness on the outside only. Inside trenchers thoughts like this had spun from a young age, making her question what is right, and what is owned to the duty of her class, her place in her class. But always, that perfect façade stayed in place, that mask of emotions on her face. Never before had anyone made her drop this mask, crack her walls. But this man had, had gone where no man had gone before, into that forbidden land. Her heart. And at last, the emotion in her eye was reveled. Love.
A/N: So. This was originally a prompt form English, but I loved the book and I rather liked this, so I decided to post it. Thoughts?
horsegirl275