"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.