Original Paragraph:
He smiled understandingly-- more than understandingly. 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. It faced-- or seemed to face-- the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished--and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.
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I really loved this part of the book, because I have been working on a definition paper about the word "smile." I thought the author did a really great job of analyzing this type of smile and describing it with colorful vocabulary. Fitzgerald does a good job of taking something simple and everyday, like a smile, and digging deeper into the meaning of it. Like in this section, he doesn't simply describe the man's facial expression, he goes deeper into what it means and what the viewer is thinking. I really enjoy this book.
