Girl & Giraffe

Like many fiction writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald kept notebooks for preserving those transitory impressions or observations that might or might not someday find their way into his creative work. On one page in one of Fitzgerald's notebooks he wrote only three words, girl and giraffe.

That quote has stayed with me, along with the probable Fitzgerald image of a slim young woman with cropped hair in pale clothes visiting a dark antiquated prison-like Victorian-style zoo in the 1920s, but I think an interpretation involving a stuffed toy and a child (named Mabel) now seems far more probable and far more interesting.