What is the importance of the title, A Girl like Phyl?

The title of the story works on two levels: first, it relates to the main story line that involves Jeff meeting and spending time with Phyl’s daughter who looks remarkably like her mother and reminds him in her actions and voice of her mother at that age; and second, it suggests the illusory nature of Jeff’s vision of Phyl. Jeff has constructed his own version of Phyl, based on his memories of her as she was twenty years before. When he finally sees her again, she is an older woman and not much like the girl he remembers. The change in her leads to his grappling with a sudden revision of the world as he understands it, and this sudden change destroys him.