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"Are you finished, already?" she asked in surprise.

"You asked me to sketch the boat, not draw a photograph," he replied, quickly glancing at Abby's detailed drawing.

"It's very good," she sighed, comparing his sketchpad with hers.

"So is yours, Abby," he encouraged her. "In many ways, yours is better than mine. You just need to put yourself into your work. You get so obsessed with getting it 'right' that you forget to put your heart into it."

"I don't understand," she said.

"Look," explained Jake, "you drew the boat, and struggled to capture every single detail. I tried to portray the spirit of the object."

"I still don't understand," whimpered Abby.

"I ignored the less important details, and concentrated on the scarred hull, the weathered paint, the battered rudder. It's reduced to a skeleton of its former glory, and is now waiting to be broken up and washed out to sea. It's really sad, when you think about it. Now look at your sketch. You treated it as though it were a bowl of fruit!"

"The bay doesn't lead to the sea," corrected Abby. "It's part of Lake Ontario."

"You know what I mean," said Jake, handing her sketchpad back.

"Yeah, I know," muttered Abby. "I look at the boat and I see an eyesore. You look at the very same object, and you see the emotion of its situation."

"That's pretty much it," he confirmed.

"I'm not sensitive like that," said Abby, resuming her work on the drawing. "I don't look with my heart. That might make me a second-rate artist, but there it is. It's quite a revelation, actually. I never understood that about myself, until now."

"I could help you," he offered.

"Jake, what you have, you can't teach me," resisted Abby, tossing aside her sketchpad in dismay. "I can draw, but I can't tell a story with pictures the way you can. I once warned you that I'm not sentimental or romantic. This is the way I am, and there's not a thing I can do about it!"

"Now you know how I sometimes feel," sighed Jake. "Does this mean that our deal is off?" he wondered, trying hard not to sound as disappointed as he was feeling. "I was kind of counting on this to somehow make it up to you."

"I keep telling you that you don't owe me anything," replied Abby, getting up from the picnic table. "Our deal is still on. This just means I wasn't cut out to be an artist-- that's all. I hate accepting defeat, though!"

"Then why do it?" he asked. "Why give up now?"

"Because we have to eat," she answered with a practical voice. "I'd rather be an adequate fly casting instructor than a no-heart starving artist. It's no use fighting it, Jake. I've been struggling with this for a long time, and only until now is it finally making sense."

Abby walked off the beach, disappointed in this new discovery of her own shortcomings. When she reached the door of the little yellow house, she was startled to find that Jake had been following hard on her heels.

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