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.
Emma Barton did not say, "Don't cry, Jennie." Without taking her eyes from the girl she opened the upper right-hand drawer of her desk, and from a neatly stacked pile of plain white handkerchiefs she took the topmost one, shook it out of its folds and handed it wordlessly to Jennie. As wordlessly Jennie took it and wiped her streaming eyes and blew her nose, and mopped her face. Emma Barton had won a thousand Jennies with a thousand neat white handkerchiefs extracted in the nick of time from that upper right-hand drawer.
"Now then, Mrs. Kromek. What's the trouble between you and Jennie? Why don't you get along, you two?"
Mrs. Kromek, no longer furtive, squared herself to state her grievance. Hers was a polyglot but pungent tongue. She made plain her meaning. Jennie was a bum, a no-good, a stuck-up. The house wasn't clean enough for Jennie. Always she was washing. Evenings she was washing herself always with hot water it was enough to make you sick. And Jennie was sassy on the boarders.
And, "I see," said Judge Barton encouragingly, at intervals, as the vituperative flood rolled on. "I see." Jennie's eyes, round with hostility, glared at her accuser over the top of the handkerchief. Finally, when the poison stream grew thinner, trickled, showed signs of stopping altogether, Judge Barton beamed understandingly upon the vixenish Mrs. Kromek. "I understand perfectly now. Just wait here, Mrs. Kromek. Jennie, come with me." She beckoned to Lottie. The three disappeared into the inner office. Judge Barton laid a hand lightly on the girl's shoulder. "Now then, Jennie, what would you like to do, h'm? Just talk to me. Tell me, what would you like to do?"
Jennie's hands writhed in the folds of her skirt. She twisted her fingers. She sobbed final dry, racking sobs. And then she rolled the judicial handkerchief into a tight, damp, hard little ball and began to talk. She talked as she had never talked to Ma Kromek. Translated, it ran thus:
At home there was no privacy. The house was full of hulking men; pipe-smoke; the smell of food eternally stewing on the stove; shrill or guttural voices; rough jests. Book-reading, bathing, reticence on Jennie's part were all shouted down as attempts at being "toney." When she came home from the factory at night, tired, nerve-worn, jaded, the house was as cluttered and dirty as it had been when she left it in the morning. The mother went with the boarders (this Jennie told as evenly and dispassionately as the rest). She had run away from home after the last hideous family fracas. She had taken the money in a spirit of hatred and revenge. She'd do it again. If they had let her go to school, as she had wanted to—she used to talk English all right, like the teacher—but you heard the other kind of talk around the house and at the factory and pretty soon you couldn't talk the right way. They made fun of you if you did. A business college course. That was what she wanted. She could spell. At school she could spell better than anyone in the room. Only they had taken her out in the sixth grade.
What to do with Jennie?
The two older women looked at each other over Jennie's head. The course in stenography could be managed simply enough. Judge Barton met such problems hourly. But what to do with Jennie in the meantime? She shrank from consigning to a detention home or a Girls' Refuge this fundamentally sound and decent young creature.
Suddenly, "I'll take her," said Lottie.