Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

Of the twenty-some young men who were waiting at the station for their dates to arrive on the ten-fifty-two, no more than six or seven were out on the cold, open platform. The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world have been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.