When he had tumbled to this, Edwin found that the whole of the main line train that he caught every morning at the junction was occupied by perhaps a hundred grouped units of the same kind. It amused him to sample them; and when one appealed to him he would become a member of it for a time and see what he could make of it. Naturally there were more interesting people on the main line than on the Halesby branch; and in the end he himself became such a familiar figure on the eight-twenty from the junction that he could say “Good-morning” to nearly every group of seasons on the train. He was even taken to the heart of the superior gruff-voiced bank clerk in the Halesby carriage. Indeed, he knew every one of them, finding them human people who, in the manner of the Englishman and the hedgehog, had put out their protective spikes upon a first acquaintance. The only Halesby traveller of whom he could make nothing was the bloated person in the fawn-coloured bowler, who began the morning with turf topics and then proceeded to suck a copying pencil till his lips were the colour of his cheeks, and, thus inspired, to underline the names of a number of horses in the day’s programme. Apart from his habit of spitting on the floor, a custom which probably saved the poor man from death by poisoning with copying ink, he was inoffensive. Edwin was even sorry for him sometimes when he saw him hung up over his forecasts. Then he would tilt the fawn-coloured bowler on to the back of his head, and scratch his head under the sandy fringe of hair. Edwin was sorry because, with a head like that, it must have been so difficult to forecast anything. He did not see many women on the morning train. In those days female enterprise was a good deal checked by conventions that died more slowly in the Midland plain than elsewhere. From Halesby itself there were only four season-ticket holders of the opposite sex. Two of them were employed in the same large drapery establishment in Queen Street, and were excessively ladylike and careful in all their behaviour. Edwin had never spoke to either of them; but he discovered in both an identical physical state: that peculiar greenish, waxen pallor that appears to be the inevitable result of serving in a draper’s shop. The black dresses on which their employers insisted, heightened this effect of fragility, and on mornings when tiredness had made them start too late for the train, so that they had to hurry over the last hundred yards, Edwin would notice how they panted for breath within their elegant corsets and how faint was the flush that came into their cheeks.