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The Great Gatsby



Chapter 1

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. 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 unsoughtfrequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized
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 judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am 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 come 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's founded on. 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 reactionGatsby, 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, as if he

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were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name
of the "creative temperament."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. NoGatsby 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 Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of
Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my 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 to-day.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like himwith special reference to the rather
hard-boiled painting that hangs in father's office 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 universeso 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, "Whyye-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 dogat least I had him for a few days until he ran awayand 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.

He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

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.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young
breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood
on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only
Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I
was rather literary in collegeone year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale
News."and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of
all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigramlife is much more successfully looked at

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from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North
America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New Yorkand where there
are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of
enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated
body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. they are not
perfect ovalslike the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact endbut their
physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. to the wingless a
more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, thewell, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express
the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. 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 standardit was a factual imitation of some Hotel 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
neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionairesall 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. And just after the war I spent two days
with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever
played football at New Havena national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited
excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously
wealthyeven in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproachbut now he'd left Chicago and
come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he'd brought down a string of polo
ponies from Lake Forest. it was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do
that.

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. This was a permanent move,
said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it - I had no sight into Daisy's heart, but I felt that Tom
would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football
game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I
scarcely knew at all. 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 gardensfinally when it reached
the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken
by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon,
and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

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.

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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 bodyhe seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see
a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of
enormous leveragea cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a
touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he likedand there were men at New Haven who had
hated his guts.

"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and
more of a man than you are." We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always
had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of
his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a
sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide
offshore.

"It belonged to Demaine, the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly.

"We'll go inside." We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored 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, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the
ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

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 and the groan of a picture
on the wall. 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, and with her chin raised a little,
as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her
eyes she gave no hint of itindeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed
her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to riseshe leaned slightly forward with a conscientious
expressionthen she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the
room.

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"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness." She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and 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.) At any rate, Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then
quickly tipped her head back againthe object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her
something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete
self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of
voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played
again. 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."

"I'd like to." "She's asleep. She's three years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's-." Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room,
stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man." "Who with?" I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly.

"You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert
for something more.

"I'd be a God damned fool to live anywhere else." At this point Miss Baker said: "Absolutely!" with such
suddenness that I startedit was the first word she uttered since I came into the room.

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Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements
stood up into the room.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted, "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training." Her
host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass.

"How you ever get anything done is beyond me." I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she "got
done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was 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 gray 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 neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm
imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker
to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto a
rosy-colored porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table 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." She looked at us all radiantly.

"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, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy.

"What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly: "What do people plan?" Before I could answer her eyes
fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

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"Look!" she complained; "I hurt it." We all lookedthe knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly.

"I know you didn't mean to, but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big,
hulking physical specimen of a-."

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was
never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all
desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to
be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over
and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to
phase toward its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the
moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret.

"Can't you talk about crops or something?" I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in
an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently.

"I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this
man Goddard?" "Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will
bewill 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. What was that word we - -."

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently.

"This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these
other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California." began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his
chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and." After an infinitesimal hesitation he
included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again.

"And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization - oh, science and art, and all that. Do you
see?" There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was
not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the

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porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically.

"It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over to-night." "Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for
some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning
till night, until finally it began to affect his nose."

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give up his position." For a moment the last
sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as
I listenedthen the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant
street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear, whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back
his chair, and without a word went inside.

As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and
singing.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of aof a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned
to Miss Baker for confirmation: "An absolute rose?" This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She
was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you
concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and
excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat
up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room
beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of
coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor-." I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised.

"I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why-." she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

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"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Don't you think?" Almost before I had
grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were
back at the table.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and continued: "I looked outdoors for a
minute, and it's very romantic outdoors.

There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line.
He's singing away-." Her voice sang: "It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?" "Very romantic," he said, and then
miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables." The telephone rang
inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all
subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the
candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one, and yet to
avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who
seemed to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic
urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguingmy own instinct
was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight
between them, strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while, trying to
look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the
porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the
velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative
questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly.

"Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding." "I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated.

"Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything." Evidently she had reason to
be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her
daughter.

"I suppose she talks, andeats, and everything." "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently.

"Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel aboutthings.

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 foolthat's
the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.' "You see I think everything's terrible

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anyhow," she went on in a convinced way.

"Everybody thinks sothe 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, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with
thrilling scorn.

"SophisticatedGod, I'm sophisticated!" The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my
belief, 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.

Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light.

Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday
Evening Post."the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light,
bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a
page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.

"To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table, "in our very next issue." Her body asserted
itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.

"Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling.

"Time for this good girl to go to bed."

"Jordan's going to play in the tournament to-morrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester."

"Ohyou're *Jordan Baker." I knew now why her face was familiarits pleasing contemptuous expression
had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and
Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten
long ago.

"Good night," she said softly.

"Wake me at eight, won't you."

"If you'll get up."

"I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon." "Of course you will," confirmed Daisy.

"In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort ofohfling you together. You
knowlock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of
thing-."

"Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs.

"I haven't heard a word."

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"She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment.

"They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way." "Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly.

"Her family."

"Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick?
She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good
for her." Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.

"Is she from New York?" I asked quickly.

"From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white-."

"Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly.

"Did I?" She looked at me.

"I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept
up on us and first thing you know-."

"Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the
door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily
called: "Wait! "I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out
West."

"That's right," corroborated Tom kindly.

"We heard that you were engaged."

"It's libel. I'm too poor."

"But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way.

"We heard it from three people, so it must be true." Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't
even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East.
You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors, and on the other hand I had no intention of
being rumored into marriage.

Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely richnevertheless, I was confused and a little
disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in
armsbut apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some
woman in New York." was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was
making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his
peremptory heart.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps
sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a
while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with

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wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of
life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that
I was not alonefifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor'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. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction.

But I didn't call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alonehe 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 seawardand 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.

Chapter 2

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 ashesa
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 men who move
dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an
invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up
with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the gray 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 gigantictheir irises are one yard high. They look out of no
face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent 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.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges
through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is
always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that
he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with
whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire to meet herbut I did. I went up to
New York with Tom on the train one afternoon, and when we stopped by the ashheaps 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." I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have
my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing
better to do.

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I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked back a hundred yards along the road
under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting
on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely
nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant, approached
by a trail of ashes; the third was a garagerepairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars bought and sold.and I
followed Tom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which
crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that
sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the proprietor himself appeared in the
door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly
handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.

"Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder.

"How's business?"

"I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly.

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

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

"Works pretty slow, don't he?"

"No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly.

"And if you feel that way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."

"I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly.

"I just meant-." His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps
on a 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 surplus flesh sensuously as some women
can.

Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, 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 and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, 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."

"Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement
color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the
vicinityexcept his wife, who moved close to Tom.

"I want to see you," said Tom intently.

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"Get on the next train."

"All right."

"I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level." She nodded and moved away from him just as George
Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight.

It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a gray, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row
along the railroad track.

"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

"Awful."

"It does her good to get away." "Doesn't her husband object?"

"Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive." So
Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New Yorkor not quite together, for Mrs.

Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who
might be on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin, which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom
helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle." and a
moving-picture magazine, and in the station drug-store some cold cream and a small flask of perfume.
Up-stairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new one,
lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing
sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the front
glass.

"I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly.

"I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to havea dog." We backed up to a gray old man who bore
an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen very recent
puppies of an indeterminate breed.

"What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as he came to the taxi-window.

"All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?"

"I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?" The man peered doubtfully into
the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

"That's no police dog," said Tom.

"No, it's not exactly a police dog," said the man with disappointment in his voice.

"It's more of an Airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back.

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"Look at that coat. Some coat.

That's a dog that'll never bother you with catching cold." "I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically.

"How much is it?"

"That dog?" He looked at it admiringly.

"That dog will cost you ten dollars." The Airedaleundoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in it
somewhere, though its feet were startlingly whitechanged hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap,
where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately.

"That dog? That dog's a boy."

"It's a bitch," said Tom decisively.

"Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it." We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft,
almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of
white sheep turn the corner.

"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here." "No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly.

"Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?"

"Come on," she urged.

"I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know."

"Well, I'd like to, but-." We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th
Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses. Throwing a regal homecoming
glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases, and went
haughtily in.

"I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the elevator.

"And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too." The apartment was on the top floora small living-room, a
small dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded to the doors with a set of
tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of
ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a
hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and
the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle." lay on
the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter," and some of the small scandal magazines of
Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator-boy went for a box full of
straw and some milk, to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large, hard dog-biscuitsone of which
decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile 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, although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting

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on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went
out to buy some at the drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared, so I sat down
discreetly in the living-room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter."either it was terrible stuff or the
whiskey distorted things, because it didn't make any sense to me.

Just as Tom and Myrtle (after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names)
reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment-door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a
complexion powdered milky white. Her eye-brows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more
rakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her
face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and
down upon her arms.

She came in with such a proprietary haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered
if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me
she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved, for there was a white spot of
lather on his cheekbone, and he was most respectful in his greeting to every one in the room. He informed me
that he was in the "artistic game," and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim
enlargement of Mrs.

Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome, and
horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times
since they had been married.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress
of cream-colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room.

With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had
been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her
assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller
around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

"My dear," she told her sister in a high, mincing shout, "most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All
they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me the bill
you'd of thought she had my appendicitis out."

"What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs.McKee.

"Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people's feet in their own homes."

"I like your dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable." Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by
raising her eyebrow in disdain.

"It's just a crazy old thing," she said.

"I just slip it on sometimes when I don't care what I look like."

"But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued Mrs. McKee.

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"If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it." We all looked in silence at
Mrs. Wilson, who removed a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile.
Mr. McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side, and then moved his hand back and forth slowly
in front of his face.

"I should change the light," he said after a moment.

"I'd like to bring out the modelling of the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair."

"I wouldn't think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee.

"I think it's-." Her husband said "*sh!" and we all looked at the subject again, whereupon Tom Buchanan
yawned audibly and got to his feet.

"You McKees have something to drink," he said.

"Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep."

"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders.

"These people! You have to keep after them all the time." She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then
she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs
awaited her orders there.

"I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

"Two of them we have framed down-stairs."

"Two what?" demanded Tom.

"Two studies. One of them I call 'Montauk POINTthe Gulls,' and the other I call 'Montauk POINTthe
Sea.'." The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

"Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she inquired.

"I live at West Egg."

"Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know him?"

"I live next door to him."

"Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's where all his money comes from."

"Really?" She nodded.

"I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me." This absorbing information about my neighbor
was interrupted by Mrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine: "Chester, I think you could do something
with her," she broke out, but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention to Tom.

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"I'd like to do more work on Long Island, if I could get the entry. All I ask is that they should give me a
start." "Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray.

"She'll give you a letter of introduction, won't you Myrtle?" "Do what?" she asked, startled.

"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him." His lips
moved silently for a moment as he invented.

"'George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,' or something like that." Catherine leaned close to me and
whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the person they're married to."

"Can't they?"

"Can't stand them." She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom.

"What I say is, why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a divorce and get
married to each other right away."

"Doesn't she like Wilson either?" The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had
overheard the question, and it was violent and obscene.

"You see," cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again.

"It's really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a Catholic, and they don't believe in divorce." Daisy was
not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.

"When they do get married," continued Catherine, "they're going West to live for a while until it blows over."

"It'd be more discreet to go to Europe."

"Oh, do you like Europe?" she exclaimed surprisingly.

"I just got back from Monte Carlo."

"Really." "Just last year. I went over there with another girl." "Stay long?"

"No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back.

We went by way of Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got gypped out
of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you.

God, how I hated that town!" The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue
honey of the Mediterraneanthen the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the room.

"I almost made a mistake, too," she declared vigorously.

"I almost married a little kyke who'd been after me for years. I knew he was below me.

Everybody kept saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's 'way below you!' But if I hadn't met Chester, he'd of got me
sure."

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"Yes, but listen," said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down, "at least you didn't marry him."

"I know I didn't."

"Well, I married him," said Myrtle, ambiguously.

"And that's the difference between your case and mine." "Why did you, Myrtle?" demanded Catherine.

"Nobody forced you to." Myrtle considered.

"I married him because I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally.

"I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe."

"You were crazy about him for a while," said Catherine.

"Crazy about him!" cried Myrtle incredulously.

"Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there."
She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression that I
had played no part in her past.

"The only crazy I was was when I married him.

I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in, and never even told
me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out." She looked around to see who was
listening. 42 "'oh, is that your suit?' I said. 'this is the first I ever heard about it.' But I gave it to him and then I
lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon." "She really ought to get away from him," resumed
Catherine to me.

"They've been living over that garage for eleven years. And tom's the first sweetie she ever had." The bottle
of whiskeya second onewas now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who "felt just as
good on nothing at all." Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a
complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk southward 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. Yet 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 was him too, looking up and
wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of
life.

Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath poured over me the story of her first
meeting with Tom.

"It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to
New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn't
keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over
his head.

When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I
told him I'd have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him
I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You

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can't live forever; you can't live forever.'." She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial
laughter.

"My dear," she cried, "I'm going to give you this dress as soon as I'm through with it. I've got to get another
one to-morrow. I'm going to make a list of all the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave, and a collar
for the dog, and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk
bow for mother's grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won't forget all the things I got to
do." It was nine o'clockalmost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten.

Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action.
Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried
44 me all the afternoon.

The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke, and from time to time
groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other,
searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. 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 bath-room floor, and women's voices scolding, and high over the
confusion a long broken wail of pain.

Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone half way he turned
around and stared at the scenehis wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and there
among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently,
and trying to spread a copy of "Town Tattle." over the tapestry scenes of Versailles.

Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed.

"Come to lunch some day," he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.

"Where?"

"Anywhere."

"Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the elevator boy.

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't know I was touching it."

"All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to." . . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the
sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

"Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . . Brook'n Bridge . . . ." 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.

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