Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Judge Barton sat in the cubby-hole of an office just beyond this, a
girl stenographer at her elbow. Outside the great window the City Hall
pigeons strutted and purled. Bright-eyed and alert as an early robin,
the judge looked up as Lottie came in. She took Lottie's hand in her
own firm fingers.
"Well!" Then they smiled at each other, these two women. "You'll stay
down and have lunch with me. I've the whole afternoon--Saturday."
"I can't."
"Of course you can. Why not?"
"I've got to be home by noon to take mother to market and to----"
"It sounds like nonsense to me," Emma Barton said, gently. And,
somehow, it did sound like nonsense.
Lottie flushed like a school-girl. "I suppose it does----" she broke
off, abruptly. "I came down to talk to you about Jennie. Jennie's the
sister of Belle's housemaid, Gussie, and she's in trouble. Her case
comes up before you this morning."
Emma Barton's eyes travelled swiftly over the charted sheets before
her. "Jennie? Jennie?--Jeannette Kromek?"
"Jeannette."
"I see," said Judge Barton, just as Lottie had before her in Belle's
kitchen that morning. She glanced at the chart of Jennie's case.
A common enough case in that court. She listened as Lottie talked
briefly. She knew the Jennie kind; Jennie in rebellion against a
treadmill of working and eating and sleeping. Jennie, the grub, vainly
trying to transform herself into Jeannette the butterfly. Excitement,
life, admiration, pretty clothes, "a chance." That was what the
Jeannettes vaguely desired: a chance.
Judge Barton did not waste any time on sentiment. She did not walk
to the window and gaze out upon the great gray city stretched
below. She did not say, "Poor little broken butterfly." She had not
become head of this judicature thus. She said, "The world's full of
Jennie--Jeannettes. I wonder there aren't more of them." The soft
bright eyes were on Lottie. They said, "You're one, you know." But she
did not utter the thought aloud. She glanced at her watch then (it
actually hung from an old-fashioned chatelaine pinned near her right
shoulder), rose and led the way into the larger room, followed by
Lottie and the girl stenographer. She mounted the low platform, slipped
into the chair at the desk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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