I stayed late that night, Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free, and I was in the garden until the lights were extinguished in the guest-rooms overhead. When he came down the steps at last his eyes were bright and tired. «She didn’t like it», he said immediately.«Of course she did».«She didn’t like it», he insisted. «She didn’t have a good time».He was silent, and I guessed at his unspeakable depression.«I feel far away from her», he said. «It’s hard to make her understand».He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: «I never loved you». After she had destroyed four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures. One of them was that, after she was free, they could go back to Louisville and be married from her house – just as if it were five years ago.«And she doesn’t understand», he said. «She used to be able to understand…»He began to walk up and down a path.«I wouldn’t ask too much of her», I said. «You can’t repeat the past».«Can’t repeat the past?» he cried in disbelief. «Why, of course you can!»He looked around him wildly.«I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before», he said, nodding determinedly. «She’ll see».He talked a lot about the past, and I understood that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. It was a cool night. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir among the stars.His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, his mind would never dance again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something – an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, but they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.