To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the-well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.
My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.
The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard-it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden.
It was Gatsby's mansion.
Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name.
My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires-all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans.
Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college.
And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.