I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.
Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe-so I decided to go east and learn the bond business.
Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man.
All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, "Why-ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces.
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 and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea.
He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone.
I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.