A girl in a wrinkled blue cloth dress, a black velvet tam o'shanter, slippers and (significant this) black cotton stockings. At sight of those black cotton stockings Lottie Payson knew, definitely, that beneath the top tawdriness of Jeannette was Jennie, sound enough. A sullen, lowering, rather frightened girl of seventeen. Her hair was bobbed. The style went oddly with the high-cheek-boned Slavic face, the blunt-fingered factory hands. With her was a shawled woman who might have been forty or sixty. She glanced about dartingly beneath lowered lids with quick furtive looks. An animal, trapped, has the same look in its eyes. The two stood at the side of the table facing Judge Barton. "Where is Otto Kromek?" "He didn't show up," the bailiff reported. No case, then. But Judge Barton did not so state. She leaned forward a little toward the girl whose face was blotched and swollen with weeping. "What's the trouble, Jennie?" Jennie set her jaw. She looked down, looked up again. The brown eyes were still upon her, questioningly. "I----" The shawled woman plucked at the girl's skirt and whispered fiercely in her own tongue. "Le' me alone," hissed the girl, and jerked away. Judge Barton turned toward the woman. "Mrs. Kromek, just stand away from Jennie. Let her talk to me. Afterward you can talk." The two separated, glaring. "Now then, Jennie, how did it all happen?" The girl begins to speak. The older woman edges closer again to catch what the low voice says. "We went ridin' with a couple fellas." "Did you know them? Were they boys you knew?" "No." "How did you happen to go riding with them, Jennie?" "We was walkin'----" "We?" "Me an' my girl friend. We was walkin'. These fellas was driving 'round slow. We seen 'em. An' they come up to the curb where we was passin' by an' asked us would we like to take a ride. Well, we didn't have nothin' else to do so----" I-sez-to-him and he-sez-to-me. The drive. Terror. A fight in the car, the sturdy girls defending themselves fiercely. Home safe but so late that the usual tirade became abuse. They had said things at home ... well ... she'd show'm. She'd run away. She had taken the hundred to spite him--Otto. "Why did you go, Jennie? You knew, didn't you?" The girl's smouldering resentment flared into open hatred. "It's her. She's always a-yellin' at me. They're all yellin' all the time. I come home from work and right away they jump on me. Nothin' I do ain't right. I'm good and sick of it, that's what. Good and sick----" She was weeping again, wildly, unrestrainedly. The older woman broke into a torrent of talk in her own thick tongue. She grasped the girl's arm. Jennie wrenched herself free. "Yeh, you!" She turned again to Judge Barton, the tears streaming down her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe them away. The Jennies of Judge Barton's court, so prone to tears, were usually poorly equipped for the disposal of them.