Ardita Farnham has a feisty will and a fiery tongue, but when seven hulking musicians

sees her yacht while her rich uncle goes ashore, she soon discovers the limits of her persuasive powers.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, today of the Classic Tales Podcast. Thank you for listening.

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Today's story was released as one of eight short stories in Flappers and Philosophers in 1920.

It was Fitzgerald's first published collection and showcases his rapid development as a writer.

And now, The Offshore Pirate by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream as colorful as blue silk stockings, and beneath the sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes.

From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden discs at the sea.

If he gazed intently enough, you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined

a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.

About halfway between the Florida shore and the golden collar, a white steam yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor and under a blue and white awning aft, a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker sette, reading

The Revolt of Angels by Anatole France.

She was about 19, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes

full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stalkingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue satin slippers, which

swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied.

And as she read, she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of

a half-lemon that she held in her hand.

The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.

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