The first supper — there would be another one after midnight — was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were three married couples and Jordan's escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside — East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety.

“Let's get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half hour. “This is much too polite for me.”