Who waves to the engineer from the back porch?

Each day, as he passes by a little white cottage, the train engineer is greeted by a woman and her daughter, who wave at him from the porch. Over the years, the engineer has come to see these friendly faces as providing certainty in an uncertain world. Everything else may have changed, but the warmth and friendliness of the woman and her daughter certainly haven't.
The trouble is that the engineer has constructed an ideal of what he thinks the woman and her daughter are really like. He's naturally, but wrongly, assumed that, because they always wave at him when he goes past on the train and because they always seem so happy to see him, they're friendly, good-natured people. But when he gets off the train one day and goes to visit them, he gets more than he bargained for. For it seems that during all those years spent driving that train, the old engineer's perspective was horribly skewed, to say the least.