No--Gatsby turned our all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby,what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

'Whenever you fell like criticising anyone,' he told me,'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'

He didn't say any more,but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way,and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.In consequence,I'm inclined to reserve all judgments,a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person,and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician,because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,unknown men.Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep,preoccupation,or a hostile levity when I realised by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon;for the intimate revelations of young men,or at least the terms in which they express them,are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.Reserving judgment is a matter of infinite hope.I was still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that,as my father snobbishly suggested,and I snobbishly repeat,a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And,after boasting this way of my tolerance,I came to the admission that it has a limit.Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes,but after a certain point I don't care what it founded on.When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in the uniform and at a sort of moral attention for ever;I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.Only Gatsby,the man who gives his name to this book,was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby,who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures