This section of the book recounts when Gatsby first meets Daisy, while he is stationed at Camp Taylor during World War I. A great deal of this recounting focuses on the great class divide between them. Gatsby falls in love with her, but he is painfully aware that,
...he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any minute the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders (156).
Daisy has no idea that he is from a different world because his uniform "cloaks" the differences between them.
When he takes leave of her, "She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life..." (156-57). Thus even before we get to the paragraph referenced in the question, we can see that money and class are important elements of this relationship.
It is in this paragraph that Daisy is said to be "gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor" (157). This simile, as many other descriptions of Daisy in the novel, is meant to convey yet again the socioeconomic difference between Gatsby and Daisy. There is a hint of an allusion, I think, to the idea that one is "born with a silver spoon in one's mouth," an expression conveying the person born into wealth, rather than attaining a wealthy status with hard work or even good luck. This simile also reminds me that it was the servants who polished the silver in Daisy's world, the work of the poor creating the "gleaming" beauty of objects that they could not hope to own. And Daisy herself is really a gleaming object, too, standing well above the poor, including Gatsby.
The reader already knows at this point that Daisy has elected to stay in her world, rejecting Gatsby's love and wealth, and that his inability to win her away from Tom is based on the fact that he is not from her world. When Fitzgerald takes us back to Gatsby and Daisy's first encounters, we can see that the seeds of impossibility were sown from the very beginning.
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