What character is the focal figure in Fitzgerald's The Offshore Pirate?

Ardita Farnam is the focal figure in Fitzgerald’s short story The Offshore Pirate.

The story opens with 19-year-old Ardita aboard a luxury yacht off the Florida coast shortly after the First World War. She is wealthy, well educated, independent-minded, and openly contemptuous of the conventional men her family expects her to meet. Her uncle has arranged the cruise partly to prevent her from seeing another beau in Palm Beach.

The plot changes when Curtis Carlyle and six Black musicians appear to seize the yacht in a theatrical pirate raid. Ardita responds with defiance and curiosity rather than fear, and the story’s emotional movement follows her developing attraction to the apparent pirate and her challenge to respectable social expectations.

The supposed pirate is eventually revealed to be Toby Moreland, the man Ardita had rejected. The elaborate performance was designed to win her affection. Fitzgerald published the story in the May 29, 1920, Saturday Evening Post, and later included it in Flappers and Philosophers.