Mrs. Stebbins gasped, "Oh, my God!" and put her
hands over her face; and Lucinda exclaimed, in outraged irritation,
"Mamma!" Carpenter looked at me, puzzled, and asked, "What is the
matter?"
XX
The accident had happened in an ill-chosen neighborhood: one of
those crowded slum quarters, swarming with Mexicans and Italians and
other foreigners. Of course, that was the only neighborhood in which
it could have happened, because it is only there that children run
wild in the streets at night. There was one child under the front
wheels, crushed almost in half, so that you could not bear to look
at it, to say nothing of touching it; and there was another, struck
by the fender and knocked into the gutter. There was an old hag of a
woman standing by, with her hands lifted into the air, shrieking in
such a voice of mingled terror and fury as I had never heard in my
life before. It roused the whole quarter; there were people running
out of twenty houses, I think, before one of us could get out of the
car.
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