She followed Anna Mary back to the cab and peered thoughtfully out over its doors as they went on, through various streets. They stopped when Anna Mary, consulting a list given her by her niece, the Sister of Charity, indicated that they should stop, and, getting out, climbed dark stairways, to wind through darker passages, filled with indescribable odors that had the effect of having been there for ages, and entered homes that consisted of two or three stuffy, forlorn little rooms, sometimes of but one room. The pleasure that Beth had imagined they should confer was rarely shown. The children might be glad later on, but the mothers to whom they announced the Christmas tree took it stolidly, sometimes almost suspiciously. It did not seem to make them glad. After a while this pilgrimage led Beth, with Anna Mary, to the five families of which Anna Mary had told Beth, the five with thirty-five children among them. None of the others had been as poor. They lived on one floor. There was little light in their rooms, but this may have been a good thing, for there was too much revealed by what light there was, too much and too little. There was no adornment here, only the least furniture, and yet hardly any space. But the worst was that the mothers looked so pitifully thin and worn, so dull-eyed and gray of skin. Beth noticed with surprise that Anna Mary’s forbidding manner fell from her like a shell which her heart had pierced, that she was soft of voice, tender of touch, mild-eyed and very, very gentle in these barren places; altogether a new and lovely Anna Mary. “It’s goodness!” thought Beth correctly. “It’s goodness and kindness and it must be there all the time! She’s a dear and she must come here often, for they know her so well! So she’s not just Anna Mary, who is a maid that looks as if she wore taffeta inside and out; she’s a good, good woman!” And this was an important discovery, not merely because it set Anna Mary in her true light, but because it showed Beth that goodness was the one real thing that counted. At last the visits were all made and Anna Mary put Beth into the taxicab for the return home. It was a quiet Beth that looked out over the infolded cab doors with her big, gray-blue eyes, seeing the melancholy streets through which they were passing as part of the poverty which she had, for the first time, realized to be a fact. Anna Mary watched her, unseen, and finally aroused her from her thoughts. “Is it plannin’ the tree you are, Miss Beth, that you’re so quiet?” she asked, though she knew Beth was not thinking of the tree. Beth turned to her with a long, indrawn breath. “No, Anna Mary. It doesn’t seem as though there could be trees,” she said. “Is it like this all the time? And in all those houses we didn’t go into?” “Maybe it was too hard on you seein’ it, Miss Beth,” said Anna Mary sympathetically. “But New York isn’t all splendid and happy, then,” said Beth. “I thought it was a fairy-land.”