bird-like irresponsibility and rather wondered that it should have the
power to detain her.

The new chapters of _Regeneration_ had taken up the same matter and had
displayed it in a somewhat different light. Abner had got hold of the
idea of limited partnership and had sought to apply it, in roundabout
fashion, to the matrimonial relation. His treatment, far from suggesting
an academic aloofness, was as concrete as characterization and
conversation could make it; no one would have supposed, at first glance,
that what chiefly moved him was a chaste abstract Platonic regard for the
whole gentler sex. In short, people--such seemed to be his thesis--might
very advantageously separate, and most informally too, as soon as they
discovered they were incompatible.

"M--no," said Medora.

"Wouldn't that be rather upsetting?" asked her mother. Mrs. Giles was an
easy-going old soul, from whom art, as personified by her own children,
got slight consideration, and to whom literature, as embodied in a
stranger, was little less than a joke. "Wouldn't it result in a good deal
of a mix-up? What would have happened to you youngsters if your father
and I had all at once taken it into our heads to----"

"Mother!" said Medora.

"Oh, well," began Mrs. Giles, with the idea of making a gradual descent
after her sudden aerial flight. "But, then," she resumed, "you must see
that----"

"Mother!" said Medora again. Abner, eager to defend his thesis, looked