Accessing file in restricted directory

As an experiment I tried, and failed, to print a file in another user's Documents directory. The accessing user (admin) has read permission on the file however they have no permissions on its parent directory (the 'Documents' directory of the other user).

~ wsee$ ls -le
drwx------@ 32 wsee  staff       1024 10 Feb 11:51 Documents
 0: group:everyone deny delete
....
~ wsee$ cd Documents
Documents wsee$ ls -le
-rw-r--r--   1 wsee  staff         12 10 Feb 11:00 test

~ admin$ cat /Users/wsee/Documents/test
cat: /Users/wsee/Documents/test: Permission denied

I wondered whether I might be able to access the file because I knew its path, please could someone explain why this wasn't the case and what stopped me from accessing it.