He went up on Tuesday to see what could be done about it.
Lessing, who rented him the apartment, made the natural mistake about it that Peter's age and his inexperience as a householder invited.

He said the neighbours were all a most desirable class of people, and Peter could see for himself that the city was bound to build out that way in a few years.

As for what Pleasanton could do in the way of climate, well, Lessing told him, with the air of being only a little less interested than he credited Peter with being, look at the perambulators.
They were as fine a lot of wellfilled vehicles as could be produced by any suburb anywhere, and Ellen for one was never tired of looking at them.

But Peter couldn't understand why Ellen insisted on walking home from church Sunday morning the wrong way of the pavement.
"I suppose we do get in the way," she admitted after he had explained to her that they wouldn't be crowded off so frequently if they moved with the nurse-maid's parade and not against it, "but if we go this way we can see all the little faces." "I didn't know you cared so much for babies." "Well, you see it isn't as if I was to have any of my own----" Something in the tone with which she admitted the restraining fact of her affliction brought out for Peter how she had fitted her life to it, like a plant growing hardily out of a rock, climbing over and around it without rancour or rebellion.

As he turned now to look at her long, plain face in the light of what had been going on in himself lately, he recalled that the determining influence which had drawn her thick hair into that unbecoming knot at the back of her neck had been the pain it had given her when she first began to put up her hair, to do it higher.
She was watching the bright little bonneted heads go by with the same detachment that he had learned to look at the shop windows, without thinking of appropriating any of their splendour for himself, and when she spoke again it was without any sensible connection with the present occasion.
"Peter, do you remember Willy Shakeley ?" "Shakey Willy, we used to call him.