West Egg (Chapters 1–3)

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 feel like criticizing any one," 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. But reserving judgments has a limit. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; 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, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out 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.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The actual founder of our line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre 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. My 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 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.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

I lived at West Egg, the — well, the less fashionable of the two egg-shaped peninsulas that jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. 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 — 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 eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour'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. Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven — a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy; he had come East from Chicago in a fashion that rather took your breath away, bringing down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. Why they came East I don't know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens. Tom Buchanan stood on the front porch in riding clothes, his legs apart. He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body — it was a body capable of enormous leverage, a cruel body.

"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. He turned me around by one arm, moving a broad flat hand along the front vista. "It belonged to Demaine, the oil man."

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise, and then laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

She held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically. "The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there's a persistent wail all night along the north shore."

"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. To-morrow!" Then she added irrelevantly: "You ought to see the baby."

Miss Baker was Jordan Baker, the golfer — a slender, small-breasted girl with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there."

"I don't know a single—"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbour, dinner was announced, and Tom Buchanan, wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

We ate on a rosy porch open toward the sunset, with four candles on the table flickering in the diminished wind.

"Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year. Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?"

Tom was talking about a book. "Civilization's going to pieces," he broke out violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard? Everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them."

Tom pressed on with his theory — the dominant race, the need to watch out or the others would have control of things — and there was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.

Tom's book is modelled on a real work of "scientific" racism of the period. Fitzgerald presents his theory as the blustering of a bully; this retelling keeps his speech short.

The telephone rang inside, and the butler left the porch. Tom excused himself and went in. Daisy got up and followed him. Miss Baker leaned forward.

"Tom's got some woman in New York," she said in a low voice.

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Don't you think?"

Daisy came back, a little too brightly, and talked about a nightingale on the lawn — "It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?" — and the telephone rang again, and nobody went near it. The fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency hung over the table for the rest of the evening.

Afterwards Daisy took me out onto the porch alone, and we sat in the twilight. I asked her about her little girl.

"Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool — that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.'

"You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so — the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way. "Sophisticated — God, I'm sophisticated!"

The instant her voice broke off, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

I drove home confused and a little disgusted. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms — but apparently there were no such intentions in her head.

When I reached my place, I sat for a while in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. A figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. But I didn't, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

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. 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 ash-grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

One Sunday afternoon I went up to New York with Tom on the train, and when we stopped by the ash-heaps he jumped to his feet and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car.

"We're getting off," he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."

He led me to a small block of yellow brick, sitting on the edge of the waste land. One of the shops in it was a garage: "Repairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold." The proprietor appeared in the doorway — a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw Tom a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.

"When are you going to sell me that car?"

"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."

Then I heard footsteps on the stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face 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 smiled slowly, walked through her husband as if he were a ghost, and shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and, without turning around, spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:

"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."

While her husband was gone, Tom said in a low voice, "I want to see you. Get on the next train." And she went on ahead, and met us in the city.

Her name was Myrtle Wilson. In New York she bought a movie magazine and some cold cream and a small bottle of perfume, and from an old man on the sidewalk she bought a puppy — "I want to get one of those," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to have — a dog." Then we went up to Tom's apartment on 158th Street, a small apartment crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it. Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it.

People came. Myrtle's sister Catherine, a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. A Mr. McKee from the flat below, a pale, feminine man who was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall, and his shrill, languid, handsome wife. Myrtle changed her dress into an elaborate afternoon gown of cream-coloured chiffon, and with the change her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur.

Catherine asked me where I lived. When I said West Egg, she said, "I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know him? Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's where all his money comes from. I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me."

Catherine told me, too, that neither Tom nor Myrtle could stand the person they were married to. Myrtle told how she had married George Wilson because she thought he was a gentleman, "but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe." He had borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in, and never even told her about it. And she told how she had met Tom: on the train, two little seats facing each other. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and she couldn't keep her eyes off him. When they came into the station he was next to her, and his white shirt-front pressed against her arm, and she was so excited that when she got into a taxi with him she hardly knew she wasn't getting into a subway train. "All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.'"

The afternoon went on into evening. I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. High over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy's name.

"Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. "I'll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai—"

Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women's voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain. I left with Mr. McKee, and the evening dissolves into fragments after that — an elevator, Mr. McKee's pictures, and then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o'clock train.

There was music from my neighbour's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. 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. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York — every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited — they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all.

I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin's-egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer: the honour would be entirely Gatsby's, it said, if I would attend his "little party" that night. Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven, and wandered around rather ill at ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn't know. I couldn't find my host. Then Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, and I was glad to see her.

We drifted around the garden together. Everywhere there were stories about Gatsby. "Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once." "It's more that he was a German spy during the war." "Oh, no, it couldn't be that, because he was in the American army during the war." "You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man." It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

Looking for Gatsby, Jordan and I went into the library — a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas. A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books.

"What do you think?" he demanded impetuously. "About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They're real."

"The books?"

He nodded. "Absolutely real — have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real." He took a volume down. "It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too — didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?"

Later, at a table in the garden, sitting with Jordan, I found myself in conversation with a man of about my own age, who said he thought he knew me — weren't we in the Third Division during the war? We talked about grey little rainy villages in France. He told me he had just bought a hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning.

"This is an unusual party for me," I said. "I haven't even seen the host. I live over there—" I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation."

For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.

"I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly.

"What!" I exclaimed. "Oh, I beg your pardon."

"I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host."

He smiled understandingly — much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished — and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.

Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow.

"Who is he?" I demanded of Jordan. "Do you know?"

"He's just a man named Gatsby. He told me once he was an Oxford man. However, I don't believe it."

"Why not?"

"I don't know," she insisted, "I just don't think he went there." Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl's "I think he killed a man." I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn't — at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn't — drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.

Gatsby stood alone on the marble steps and looked from one group to another with approving eyes. No one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby's shoulder. Then his butler came to Jordan: Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to her alone. She was gone an hour. When she came back she said she had just heard the most amazing thing, but she had promised not to tell it, and she was tantalizing me with it as she said good night.

As I left, a new coupé was lying in the ditch beside the road, violently shorn of one wheel. Out of the car emerged the owl-eyed man and, after a moment, the actual driver, a pale dangling individual who seemed surprised to discover that the wheel was gone. "At least," he observed, "we've got a wheel." I glanced back. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer. Most of the time I worked — in the early morning I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust; I ate lunch with the other clerks; I spent my evenings studying investments and securities, or walking up Fifth Avenue. I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night.

For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her, because she was a golf champion, and every one knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something — most affectations conceal something eventually. I remembered a story about her that had approached the newspapers: at her first big golf tournament there had been a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal, then died away. A caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage.

It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. She passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man's coat.

"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't to drive at all."

"I am careful."

"No, you're not."

"Well, other people are," she said lightly. "They'll keep out of my way. It takes two to make an accident."

"Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself."

"I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why I like you."

For a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home — a girl to whom I had been writing letters once a week and signing them "Love, Nick." Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.