“Did the ecclesiastical courts take the position that all marriages were made in heaven?”

Mr. Tutt shrugged his shoulders.

“‘Once married, always married,’ was their doctrine.”

“Then how did people who were unhappily married get rid of one another?”

“They didn’t—­if the courts ruled that they had actually been married—­but 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.  If that were not so every couple in order to continue legally married would have to go through a new ceremony in every state through which they traveled.”