The answer to a very old question is: 9.

In the comments to the previous post — "Things to do with cigarettes," which looked at some fabulous vintage ads for a long forgotten cigarette brand, Murad — Laslo Spatula was inspired to rewrite some of the sentences that were part of my old "Gatsby" project (where I'd take a sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and we'd talk about it out of context).

So Laslo was posting things like:

"A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one smoking a Murad."

Here's the old post from "Gatsby" project, where you see the original sentence from the novel was: "A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

The first commenter on that post asks "How many times does the word 'yellow' come up in a search of 'The Great Gatsby'?"

Within the half hour, I give him my answer: 24. And that makes me want to count the rest of the colors. Is yellow the dominant "Gatsby" color? What's most likely to beat it? The other primary colors. Using the search function in Kindle, I found 22 appearances of "blue," but...

Red can't be counted via Kindle, which includes the letters "red" within other words, like "declared," "considered," and "incredulously."

I proceeded to the rest of the colors:

Purple: 0
Orange: 4
Brown: 7
Black: only 13 (very surprising)
White: 50 (the book is racist!)
Green: 19
Pink: 6
Lavender: 6

Seeing that old post today, I wondered if the Kindle software had changed since then (January 2013). And yes, it had! I got my answer. 9!

Only 9 for "red." Surprisingly low considering 24 for "yellow" and 22 for blue. Was F. Scott Fitzgerald aversive to red for some reason? There are 19 "red"s in "The Last Tycoon" and 25 in "Tender Is the Night," so the avoidance of red seems to be "Gatsby" specific.

There are only 9, so I will quote them all for you, and let's think about how "red" was used and why it was used sparingly:

1. "I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew."

2. "Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay."

3. "Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard."

4. "The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white."

5. "One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song."

6. "We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of red-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded-gilt nineteen-hundreds."

7. "I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind, and whenever this happened the red, white, and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut, in a disapproving way."

8. "She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages."

9. "There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water."

We see red in various objects in ##1 (money), 2 (a mansion), 3 (gas pumps), 6 (ships), 7 (the American flag) and twice — ##4 and 5 — in women's hair. #8, as part of a proper name, might deserve little attention, but it is about blood and points to #9, the really important one, which really is blood, though the word "blood" doesn't appear.

Spoiler alert... it's Gatsby's blood. He's shot dead in the swimming pool. The "mattress" is the flotation device he's lying on, and we learn of his death in that 9th appearance of "red" — "a thin red circle in the water." It's just color and geometry. You figure out that it's blood.

That distancing contrasts with the one appearance of the word "blood" in "The Great Gatsby":

The other car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust. 

No use of the tightly hoarded word "red" is expended on Myrtle. Her blood is "dark blood" — as it mixes not with water but with dust.

Such are the colors of "Gatsby," and a long-unfinished count is completed. The answer is: 9.

I imagine the first commenter cranking me up again and asking "How many times does the word 'nine' come up in a search of 'The Great Gatsby'?"

The answer is 6, and every single one is the time of day.