Sentence No. 65 · 31 May 2026
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby (1925) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The restrictive clause "that you may come across four or five times in life" modifies "smiles," not "it" — so it attaches to the earliest noun phrase ("smiles"), not the nearest one. When a "that" clause appears late, trace back to the noun it logically limits.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 7 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. Nick Carraway describes the extraordinary quality of Gatsby's smile. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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