"He smiled understandingly-much 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 eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. 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 rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care."
It was soon after she and Jack had first met that Princess Eugenie read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. One particular passage in which Jay Gatsby is described reminded her immediately of Jack. She decided that she wanted eventually to let Jack know how much those words had brought him to mind. That is why they have had a special place (as the second reading) in today's wedding service.
The words that particularly reminded her of Jack concerned Gatsby's smile. As we heard from the reading: "it was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it…….. It concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour."
Well, a few years have passed, and Eugenie and Jack come here today to smile on each other, and to offer each other something like "eternal reassurance" and the promise of an "irresistible prejudice" in each other's favour.
