“Guilty.” The girl nodded her head.
The evidence was presented. Then the husband of the young lady spoke: “If your Honor please. This is the first time this sort of thing has happened. I will give my pledge that it will not happen again.”
The judge raised himself on his elbows, stared through his glasses and exclaimed: “I’ll see that it doesn’t happen again for sixty days. The idea! A woman of your intelligence going into a store and carrying off a dress that doesn’t belong to you and you don’t need! Why did you do it?”
“I—I don’t know, Judge. I—I just saw it there. I—I liked it. So, the first thing I knew I was taking it away.”
“Exactly. Sixty days! Sit over there.”
The judge pointed to a row of chairs at the right of his box; the defendant burst into tears, dabbled her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief; her young husband led her to a seat and, for the time, the affair was ended.
“The judge will allow her to weep for a couple of hours,” Drew explained in a whisper. “Meantime, his secretary in the back room will get some people on the wire and look up her record. If her record is good, he’ll set his sentence aside, put her on a year’s probation. Probably never hear from her again. She’s had about enough.
“But why do they do it?” he exclaimed in a whisper. “If you were a young woman would you go through all this and carry the memory of the humiliation and disgrace through a long life for a fourteen dollar dress? You would not; nor for forty dresses!
“But they do it, over and over and over. Hats, belts, coats, dresses, artificial flowers. What don’t they steal? And they come to court, sometimes three or four a day, to stand before the judge and weep. You’d think they’d learn, that everyone in the world would learn after awhile, everyone, except the professional shoplifter. But they don’t.”
And now a score of young black men stood before the bench. They were accused of gambling with dice. The dice, a hook for raking them in, and a few coins were offered in evidence.