The image started out as a young boy and girl in an orchard; the boy places apples into her skirt. Over the next set of studies, the boy was removed while the girl was transported from the orchard itself to a doorway, through which the viewer can see the orchard in the background. Eventually, the image was rotated so that the girl and the doorway are directly in front of the viewer. The orchard was replaced by the ocean and the apples with seashells.

Pratt has observed that by changing the setting for this painting from an orchard to a typical Newfoundland house by the sea, the idea was no longer one based on a past mythology but had become something from where he was now living. He realized that the young woman who posed for the painting was bringing something from her own world, of which seashells were a much more appropriate symbol than apples; and that she also brought and "gave me the opportunity to do drawings of traditional figure subjects, the kind of drawings and paintings of the human figure that artists have always done, a gift from her own world and not the world of literature and legends. So I changed the apples into seashells because we are more linked to the oceans than orchards." Subsequently, the same model posed for other paintings, eg. Young Woman With A Slip.

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