"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 characters most concerned in it, let us for the time being look over the shoulder of God and inform ourselves of their various occupations and preoccupations of a Saturday afternoon in late June during the hour before dinner. Eleanor, in her little white chamber on Thirtieth Street, was engaged in making a pink and green toothbrush case for a going-away gift for her Uncle Peter. To be sure she was going away with him when he started for the Long Island beach hotel from which he proposed to return every day to his office in the city, but she felt that a slight token of her affection would be fitting and proper on the eve of their joint departure. She was hurrying to get it done that she might steal softly into the dining-room and put it on his plate undetected. Her eyes were very wide, her brow intent and serious, and her delicate lips lightly parted. At that moment she bore a striking resemblance to the Botticelli head in Beulah's drawing-room that she had so greatly admired. Of all the people concerned in her history, she was the most tranquilly occupied.