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.

That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very often. She went with a slightly older crowd—when she went with anyone at all. Wild rumors were circulating about her—how her mother had found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any more but only with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town who couldn’t get into the army at all.

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

她要跟我说话，我觉得很光彩，因为在所有年纪比我大的女孩当中，我最崇拜的就是她。她问我是否到红十字会去做绷带。我说是的。那么，可否请我告诉他们说这天她不能来了？黛西说话的时候，那位军官盯住她看，每一个姑娘都巴望人家有时会用这种神态来看自己。因为我觉得那非常浪漫，所以我后来一直记得这个情节。他的名字叫杰伊·盖茨比，从那以后一隔四年多，我一直没再见过他——就连我在长岛遇到他以后，我也不知道原来就是同一个人。那是一九一七年。到了第二年，我自己也有了几个男朋友，同时我开始参加比赛，因此我就不常见到黛西。她来往的是一帮比我年纪稍大一点的朋友——如果她还跟任何人来往的话。关于她的荒唐谣言到处传播——说什么有一个冬天夜晚她母亲发现她在收拾行装，准备到纽约去跟一个正要到海外去的军人告别。家里人有效地阻止了她，可是事后她有好几个星期不跟家里人讲话。从那以后她就不再跟军人一起玩了，只跟城里几个根本不能参军的平脚近视的青年人来往。等到第二年秋天，她又活跃起来，和以前一样活跃。停战以后她参加了一次初进社交界的舞会，据说二月里她跟新奥尔良市来的一个人订了婚。六月里她就跟芝加哥的汤姆·布坎农结了婚，婚礼之隆重豪华是路易斯维尔前所未闻的。他和一百位客人乘了四节包车一同南来，在莫尔巴赫饭店租了整个一层楼，在婚礼的前一天他送了她一串估计值三十五万美元的珍珠。