From time to time the troubled parents tried other diplomacies of increasing feebleness, until finally it seemed best to mention the subject, even indirectly, no more. In the evenings the silences in the library were charged with feeling withheld from expression; though Dan enlivened the room when he came in, and made it boisterous if he brought the baby with him. Certainly no depression could be recorded against either of this pair; Henry Daniel glowed with health and became livelier with every month of increasing age and weight. As for Lena, after her outburst upon the reading of Mrs. Savage’s will, she was another of this household who was surcharged with repressed feeling; but her repression became a habit;—weeks went by when she did not slam a door. She appeared to become more tolerant of her husband at this period than she had ever been; and when she spoke to him at all, it was in a tone suggesting that her tolerance had in it something of compassion. She devoted herself to her baby, perhaps finding a refuge in her devotion; but she declined to accompany Dan on Sunday afternoons when he went for a sidewalk excursion with the perambulator. This was an established custom in the town, she observed: every Sunday, early in the afternoon, the young fathers and mothers began to appear upon the sidewalks, the fathers pushing the baby-carriages and the mothers strolling a little way behind with the toddlers, if there were any of these, or perhaps lingering for a moment of gossip with friends encountered by the way, then scurrying on to overtake the perambulator. High and low followed the custom; it was as well observed by the South Side, where lived most of the followers of handicrafts, as it was upon National Avenue and Amberson Boulevard. The perambulators of these two thoroughfares were the more luxurious; fine lace was to be seen upon the occupants, and the accompanying parents were well dressed; though Lena, looking from her window, sometimes shivered to see one of the passing young husbands wearing a Derby hat as a complement to the long frock coat that appeared to be a regalia garment necessary to this occasion. By four o’clock, which was Dan’s favourite hour for his weekly perambulator stroll, most of the pedestrian families were on their way homeward from “Sunday dinner at grandpa’s and grandma’s,” the grandma and grandpa being almost invariably the parents of the young mother. Lena objected to the parade as “publicly provincial,” and pointed out that Dan lacked any plausible reason for joining it;—if the baby needed air he could be taken for a drive in the family carriage; and if Dan insisted on pushing him in the perambulator, the Oliphants’ back yard was “twice the size of Madison Square,” she said with elaborate exaggeration; but Henry Daniel’s father only laughed and continued to follow the custom of his fellow-townsmen.