![]() Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. ![]() She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. “I just meant-” His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. “And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.” “I don’t mean that,” explained Wilson quickly. “When are you going to sell me that car?” “Next week I’ve got my man working on it now.” “Works pretty slow, don’t he?” “No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “How’s business?” “I can’t complain,” answered Wilson unconvincingly. “Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. The interior was unprosperous and bare the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. Cars bought and sold.-and I followed Tom inside. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes the third was a garage-Repairs. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing. I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. “I want you to meet my girl.” I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon, and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car. ![]() Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire to meet her-but I did. ![]() His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fat ten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic - their retinas are one yard high. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land.
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