1 "It's only half past nine," she said.
2 I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.
3 So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
4 By half past two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to Gatsby's house.
5 He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
6 I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say.
7 He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.
8 After that, if the night was mellow I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel and over Thirty-third Street to the Pennsylvania Station.
9 Just as the latter was getting uneasy some workmen came past the door bound for his restaurant and Michaelis took the opportunity to get away, intending to come back later.
10 Gatsby's notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news.
11 However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders.
12 On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains.
13 One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own.