Читать книгу Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby онлайн

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I graduated from New Haven[1] in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in the Great War. Then I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a cardboard bungalow at eighty a month. I had an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast, and muttered Finnish words to herself over the electric stove.

One morning some man stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. The life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold.