Two King Charles' spaniels &; a little German girl

On a train to Cambridge, as I sit huddled in my seat waiting for the
warmth of the train to permeate and dispel the chill of February, I
watch a girl and her mother fight two King Charles spaniels for a pair
of seats. As fast as they push the dogs onto the floor, each time with
a disgruntled yelp, they climb up again. When the girl manages to claim
her seat, she produces a clean, neatly folded brown woollen blanket
that she spreads over her knees. The ruby King Charles jumps up as soon
as she can, turns round like a cat in her mistress's lap, and sits
down. She stares at me through the gap in the seats; she has regal eyes
and bearing, but her tongue lolling in glorious contentment breaks the
illusion somewhat. The other dog, the liver and white, is older and
heavier, and demands with an imperious yelp to be lifted into the lap
of the mother. Hands reach down to transport her, and she disappears
from my view.

A little German girl sits across the aisle, chattering away contentedly
in her own language, little blond head and bright smile bobbing as she
recites numbers in hundreds, which are comprehensible even to my feeble
German. She kneels up on her seat and talks across the divide to a
woman who must be her grandmother, while the woman beside her looks on
with an expression of mild apprehension, brought on because she hasn't
a clue what the child is saying.

A black man, dressed in a black bomber jacket and tight jeans, who
appears to be the sort of person to whom his 'hard man' image is
everything, leans across the aisle as the train pulls into Cambridge
and begins to rub the ruby spaniel under the chin. The dog stretches
her neck in enjoyment and the man shows no self-consciousness. The girl
on whose lap the dog resides does not look comfortable, though. Her
face has an aspect of fear and distaste, and she leans back into her
seat, pushing her shoulders into the foam.