The handle turned again.

“I bet you’re dancing,” he said to the person on the other side of the locked door.

Footsteps pattered away down the train.

First of all, when I reach there, I’ll have a Bass and a stale sandwich, he decided. I’ll take them to a table in a corner, brush off the cakecrumbs with my hat, and prop my book against the cruet. I must have all the details right at the beginning. The rest must come by accident. I’ll be sitting there before noon, cool and calm, my hat on my knees, my glass in my hand, looking not a day under twenty, pretending to read and spying from the corners of my eyes at the waiting, drinking, restless people busily alone at the counter. The other tables will be crowded. There will be women, beckoning without moving, over their cold coffee; old, anonymous men with snuff on their cheeks, trembling over tea; quiet men expecting no one from the trains they wait for eagerly every hour; women who have come to run away, to take a train to St. Ives or Liverpool or anywhere, but who know they will never take any train and are drinking cups of tea and saying to themselves, “I could be catching the twelve o’clock but I’ll wait for the quarter past”; women from the country with dozens of children coming undone; shop girls, office girls, street girls, people who have nothing worse to do, all the unhappy, happy in chains, bewildered foreign men and women in the station buffet of the city I know from cover to cover.

The door rattled. “You there,” a voice said outside. “You’ve been there for hours.”

He turned on the hot water tap. It spurted cold water into the basin before he could take his hat out. “I’m a director of the company,” he said, but his voice sounded weak to him and without assurance.

When the footsteps had faded again, he gathered up his cases and walked out of the lavatory and down the corridor. Standing outside a first-class compartment, he saw a man and a ticket-inspector come to the door and hammer on it. They did not try the handle.

“Ever since Neath,” the man said.

Now the train was losing speed, running out of the lost country into the smoke and a tunnel of factories, puffing past the district platforms and the high houses with broken windows and underclothes dancing in the dirty yards. Children at the windows never waved their hands to the train. It might have been the wind passing.

A crowd of people stood arguing outside the door as the train drew up under a great glass roof.