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Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan's working-class lover in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, wants “one of those police dogs” as an ornament “for the apartment,” because “they are nice to have” (27). Tom, Myrtle, and our narrator, Nick Carraway, have just arrived at Penn Station and gotten into a taxi, in the novel's second chapter. Myrtle boarded the train in Queens, site of her home in the Eliotic “valley of ashes,” joining Nick and Tom on the rail commute from their respective class-bound Long Island Eggs, upper East and nouveau West, into the city that is “built with a wish out of non-olfactory money” (69).

The news of Tennyson's death affected Bradley profoundly, propelling her back to a pastoral, “Victorian” past that seems remote from her urban fin de siècle world of the Underground and rapid-cycle tabloid news. Bradley is returned, she writes, to “days when ‘The Miller's Daughter’ bounded my horizons.—My way of looking at the universe was unquestionably determined by Tennyson” (Field, Works 5: 5).