t that left a loophole. When was a marriage not a marriage?
Answer: When the parties were closely enough related by blood or
marriage, or either of them was mentally incapable, under age, victims
of duress, fraud, mistake, previously contracted for, or--already
married."

"Ah!" breathed Tutt, thinking of Mr. Higgleby.

"The ecclesiastical law remained without any particular variation until
after the American Revolution and the colonies separated from Great
Britain, and as there was no union of church and state on this side of
the water, and so no church to take control of the subject or
ecclesiastical courts to put its doctrines into effect, for a while
there was no divorce law at all over here, and then one by one the
states took the matter up and began to make such laws about it as each
saw fit. Hence the jolly old mess we are in now!"

"Jolly for us," commented Tutt. "It means dollars per year to us. Well,"
he remarked, stretching his legs and yawning, "divorce is sure an evil."

"That's no news," countered Mr. Tutt. "It was just as much of an evil in
the time of Moses, of Julius Caesar, and of Edward the Confessor as it
is now. There hasn't been anything approaching the flagrancy of Roman
divorce in modern history."

"Thank heaven there's still enough to pay our office rent--anyhow!" said
Tutt contentedly. "I hope they won't do anything so foolish as to pass
a national divorce law."

"They won't," Mr. Tutt assured him. "Most Congressmen are lawyers and
are not going to take the bread out of their children's mouths. Besides,
the power to regulate the domestic relations of the United States, not
being delegated under the Constitution to the Federal Government, is
expressly retained by the states themselves."

"You've given me a whole lot of ideas," admitted Tutt. "If I get you
rightly, as each state is governed by its own independent laws, the
status of married persons must be governed by the law of the state where
they are; otherwise if every couple on some theory of exterritoriality
carried the law of the state where they happened to have been joined
together round with them we would have the spectacle of every state in
the union interpreting the divorce laws of every other state--confusion
worse confounded."

"On the other hand," returned Mr. Tutt, "the law is settled that a
marriage valid when made is valid everywhere; and conversely, if invalid
where made is invalid everywhere--like our Mongolian case. I