《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter III》第23节
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 everyone 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, even though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semifinal 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. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind. Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.
注释摘要
尼克重新拾起了他与乔丹·贝克的故事，用的是“失而复得”这样轻描淡写的口吻。他说一度没见到她，仲夏时又遇上了。一开始，跟她一起出门让他觉得挺有面子，因为她是个高尔夫冠军，“人人都知道她的名字”。这很直白地交代了乔丹的社会身份——她是那个时代刚刚冒头的体育明星，属于新潮女性，靠本事吃饭，在纽约这种社交圈里有相当的知名度。但尼克马上修正了自己的说法，“Then …