"Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-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."

"The Great Gatsby" is flowing with light and darkness, we've seen time and again in this Gatsby project (where we isolate our sentence of the day and have at it). We can almost always begin with the question: Where is the light? And if not where is the light then: Where is the energy that is like light? Some sentences are just light and darkness chasing each other around. Sometimes we get an overwhelming darkness, but there's a play of light.

Today we have a description of a woman, whose face and body each has its own separate claws clause. There's her face above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine. So the dress, the inanimate thing is the overwhelming darkness. The face, being "above," seems detached...



It's devoid of light — no gleam. None of the gleam that would be beauty. No facet...


So forget that face. How about the body under the dress — the dark, spotted dress?



Here, we find the energy, but it's not light. It's fire. Under the dark dress, there is vitality. It's perceptible, as if we're seeing through the spotted dress down into her nerves, her slowly burning — smouldering — nerves.