self-absorbed to notice. Their one-sided romance persisted for the next two .

             years. Fitzgerald would send hundreds of letters, but Ginevra, who thought .

             them to be clever but unimportant, destroyed them in 1917. The following .

             year, Ginevra sent Scott a letter that announced her marriage to a naval .

             ensign. Just before Fitzgerald was to meet with Ginevra after a twenty-year .

             absence,.

             2.

             he proclaimed to his daughter, with mixed feelings of regret and nostalgia: .

             "She was the first girl I ever loved and have faithfully avoided seeing her .

             up to this moment to keep the illusion perfect, because she ended up by .

             throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference" (Meyers, .

             30). Although heartbroken at the time, Fitzgerald answered Yeats" crucial .

             question-- "Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman lost or a .

             woman won?" -- by using his lost love as imaginative inspiration. For in .

             his 1925 masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, he recreated the elusive, .

             unattainable Ginevra as the beautiful and elegant Daisy Fay Buchanan.

             Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald described Daisy as an almost disembodied .

             voice which, Gatsby realized at the end, was "full of money." Fitzgerald .

             wrote, "her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes .

             and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that .

             men who had cared for her found difficult to forget" (Fitzgerald, 14). It .

             should be noted that, "Gatsby"s ability, like Fitzgerald"s, 'to keep that .

             illusion perfect" sustains his self-deceptive and ultimately .

             self-destructive quest, with the help of his own fabulous money, to win .

             Daisy back from her husband" (Meyers, 30).

             Although Ginevra King was Fitzgerald"s first true love, she certainly was .

             not his last. In July 1918, while stationed in Montgomery, Alabama with the .