"Diddy bored (now). He's finished the newspaper. Hungry, which always happens on trains. Restless. A conductor comes to collect everyone's ticket. Whose tickets? Our tickets. In an express train which is rapidly passing many stations without stopping, each station identical with the last, Diddy is cooped up among interchangeable people. But being fellow traveler of life, incorrigibly hopeful though sharply disillusioned, he will make the effort to tell one from the other. He casts a moderate, diffused look at the others in the compartment: to stare wouldn't be polite."