"Yaas, he is very objectionable. But you are referring to the poet. He was referring to the jurist. The jurist wrote a very fine book. Let me quote a passage from it. 'It is the present and perfect consent the which alone maketh matrimony, without either solemnisation or'--here, Dunwoodie, skipping the frank old English, substituted--'or anything else, for neither the one nor the other is the essence of matrimony, but consent only. Consensus non concubitus facit matrimoniam.' Hum! Ha! In other words, whether marriage is or is not contracted in facie ecclesiae, it is consent alone that constitutes its validity. You understand Latin?" Cassy laughed. "I dream in it." Dunwoodie laughed too. "Pleasant dreams to you always. But what I have quoted was the common law, and so remained until altered by the Revised Statutes, with which no doubt you are equally familiar." Cassy smoothed her frock. "I was brought up on them." "I don't need to tell you then that when adopted here they provided that marriage should be a civil contract. In so providing, they merely reaffirmed the existing common law. Subsequently, the law was changed. The legislature enacted that a marriage must be solemnised by certain persons--ecclesiastic, judicial or municipal--or else, that it should be entered into by written contract, which contract was to be filed in the office of the town clerk. Coincidentally the legislature prohibited any marriage contracted otherwise than in the manner then prescribed." That morning Cassy had been to an agent, a saponacious person with a fabulous nose. At the moment the nose was before her. She was wondering whether it would scent out for her an engagement. "However," Dunwoodie, twisting the edge of his towel, continued, "various amendments were afterward adopted and certain sections repealed. Among the latter was the one containing the prohibition which I have cited. In my opinion, it was not the intention of the legislature to repeal it. Yet, however that may be, repealed it was. Since then, or, more exactly, a few weeks ago, the enactments regarding the manner in which marriage must be solemnised were held to be not mandatory but directory, the result being that the law originally prevailing has now come again into operation, common-law marriages are as valid as before and----" Here Dunwoodie flaunted the towel. "And you are Mrs. Paliser." Of the entire exposition, Cassy heard but that. It ousted the agent and his fabulous nose. She bristled. "I can't be. I don't want to be. You don't seem to see that the clergyman was not a clergyman at all. He was one of the help there. I thought I told you. Why, there was not even a license! That man said he had one. It was only another of the whimsicalities that took me in."