"I s'pose," thought the observant little girl, "that these children are so dirty because their mothers have so many to take care of. While they are washing one baby the others are getting dirty in this awfully dirty street. So, if they keep on all day washing them, they would never be all clean at once! But," admitted the philosophical Carolyn May, slowly, "it's funny not to see _any_ clean babies here at all. I wonder where those are that have just been scrubbed." The house, the number of which the pale lady had given the little girl, seemed slightly less disreputable than many of its neighbours. It was merely a slice of the brick block, but had been recently painted. There were four apartments on each floor, two in front and two in the rear. The pale lady lived in one of the rear apartments, one flight up from the street. The children who crowded the stairway made way for Prince and watched him narrowly. Without him Carolyn might have found some difficulty in getting up to the pale lady's rooms. She might, too, have found some of these children as unpleasant as the red-haired Sade had been, had Prince not been her companion. But, as it was, she went boldly to the pale lady's door and knocked. The latter welcomed Carolyn and Prince cheerfully. Her little, dark rooms were scrupulously clean; but in the kitchen, to which the lady took her small friend, the evidences of poverty were not to be hidden. The kitchen had two big windows overlooking a littered and dirty backyard. These windows were really the only ones of any account in the place; for those of the sitting room and bedroom between looked out into airshafts. The smells of cooking and boiling clothes rose through the house, and odours from the yard were such that it was far pleasanter to keep the windows closed than open. The lady, with her beautiful hair, her beautifully clean and sweet-smelling skin, her well-cared-for hands, her warm if rather wistful smile, all appealed strongly to the little girl. Poor as the pale lady must be, Carolyn saw that she was quite as careful of her personal appearance as was her own mamma. And the baby was as sweet as a rose! They put him down on the floor on a folded quilt and let him play with Prince to his heart's content. Meanwhile the pale lady and Carolyn became very well acquainted. Of course, it began with babies; but "babies" is such a fruitful subject for discussion that they branched off into a dozen topics, all leading from, or appertaining to, babies. Carolyn could not remember much about her own babyhood--and that was funny, she said, because she certainly ought to be the one to recall most clearly what happened to her at that time. But she had known about babies, she told the pale lady, "for years and years."