Expected behavior?

While doing some work with classes today I came across something I found a bit puzzling. I have a page that requires a class file, and in that file (file 2) it requires another file (file 3). On the 1st required file I get an error on compile because php can't find file 3. File 1 lives in a different directory than file 2, which is causing the error. My question then is, should this be happening? Is this the expected behavior? (In a perfect world, shouldn't file 3 be included relative to file 2, and not the calling file (file 1)?) Has anyone come up with an elegant way around this? // seth