Even then, however, Pollyanna was not convinced.
"But I don't see," she argued, "why it's any better, or even so nice, for a whole lot of folks to club together and do what everybody would like to do for themselves. I'm sure I'd much rather give Jamie a—a nice book, now, than to have some old Society do it; and I KNOW he'd like better to have me do it, too."
"Very likely," returned Mrs. Carew, with some weariness and a little exasperation. "But it is just possible that it would not be so well for Jamie as—as if that book were given by a body of people who knew what sort of one to select."
This led her to say much, also (none of which Pollyanna in the least understood), about "pauperizing the poor," the "evils of indiscriminate giving," and the "pernicious effect of unorganized charity."
"Besides," she added, in answer to the still perplexed expression on Pollyanna's worried little face, "very likely if I offered help to these people they would not take it. You remember Mrs. Murphy declined, at the first, to let me send food and clothing—though they accepted it readily enough from their neighbors on the first floor, it seems."
"Yes, I know," sighed Pollyanna, turning away. "There's something there somehow that I don't understand. But it doesn't seem right that WE should have such a lot of nice things, and that THEY shouldn't have anything, hardly."
As the days passed, this feeling on the part of Pollyanna increased rather than diminished; and the questions she asked and the comments she made were anything but a relief to the state of mind in which Mrs. Carew herself was. Even the test of the glad game, in this case, Pollyanna was finding to be very near a failure; for, as she expressed it:
"I don't see how you can find anything about this poor-people business to be glad for. Of course we can be glad for ourselves that we aren't poor like them; but whenever I'm thinking how glad I am for that, I get so sorry for them that I CAN'T be glad any longer. Of course we COULD be glad there were poor folks, because we could help them. But if we DON'T help them, where's the glad part of that coming in?" And to this Pollyanna could find no one who could give her a satisfactory answer.
Especially she asked this question of Mrs. Carew; and Mrs. Carew, still haunted by the visions of the Jamie that was, and the Jamie that might be, grew only more restless, more wretched, and more utterly despairing. Nor was she helped any by the approach of Christmas. Nowhere was there glow of holly or flash of tinsel that did not carry its pang to her; for always to Mrs. Carew it but symbolized a child's empty stocking—a stocking that might be—Jamie's.
Finally, a week before Christmas, she fought what she thought was the last battle with herself. Resolutely, but with no real joy in her face, she gave terse orders to Mary, and summoned Pollyanna.