outside. By gosh! I wish Beulah could hear me."

"By just not being bashful, do you mean?"

"That's the idea."

"Well, when Aunt Beulah makes me do those dancing exercises, standing
up in the middle of the floor and telling me to be a flower and
express myself as a flower, does she just mean not to be bashful?"

"Something like that: she means stop thinking of yourself and go
ahead--"

"But how can I go ahead with her sitting there watching?"

"I suppose I ought to tell you to imagine that you had the soul of a
flower, but I haven't the nerve."

"You've got nerve enough to do anything," Eleanor assured him, but she
meant it admiringly, and seriously.

"I haven't the nerve to go on with a moral conversation in which you
are getting the better of me at every turn," Peter laughed. "I'm sure
it's unintentional, but you make me feel like a good deal of an ass,
Eleanor."

"That means a donkey, doesn't it?"

"It does, and by jove, I believe that you're glad of it."

"I do rather like it," said Eleanor; "of course you don't really feel
like a donkey to me. I mean I don't make you feel like one, but it's
funny just pretending that you mean it."

"Oh! woman, woman," Peter cried. "Beulah tried to convey something of
the fact that you always got the better of every one in your modest
unassuming way, but I never quite believed it before. At any rate it's
bedtime, and here comes Mrs. Finnigan to put you to bed. Kiss me good
night, sweetheart."

Eleanor flung her arms about his neck, in her first moment of
abandonment to actual emotional self-expression if Peter had only
known it.

"I will never really get the better of you in my life, Uncle Peter,"
she promised him passionately.

CHAPTER X

THE OMNISCIENT FOCUS

One of the traditional prerogatives of an Omnipotent Power is to look
down at the activities of earth at any given moment and ascertain
simultaneously the occupation of any number of people. Thus the Arch
Creator--that Being of the Supreme Artistic Consciousness--is able to
peer into segregated interiors at His own discretion and watch the
plot thicken and the drama develop. Eleanor, who often visualized this
proceeding, always imagined a huge finger projecting into space,
cautiously tilting the roofs of the Houses of Man to allow the sweep
of the Invisible Glance.

Granting the hypothesis of the Divine privilege, and assuming for the
purposes of this narrative the Omniscient focus on the ch