Person A should use headphones or EarPods or close her eyes.
Yes, because that stops people who want to chat every time (trust me it doesn’t) and I highly doubt it would have worked on B due to her reputation of talking to people on the bus.
Indeed not, but it's a sad state of affairs if we only focus on what we are responsible for and have no care for anything else. A little compassion would be nice.
Compassion goes both way. Forcing conversation onto a stranger is not compassionate, ignoring their desire to be alone is not compassionate. Considering that they may want to be left alone and waiting to see if someone else would like to chat who may be like you is compassionate.
My understanding from the OP was that they just wanted to sit and daydream, but I accept that there might be more to it than that.
So? What’s wrong with that? Are you really saying that someone has to have a “legitimate” reason to want to be left alone?
I think it a sad state of affairs that women are still expected to “be nice” to strangers and if they’re not they’re called “miserable bores, cu**s, lacking of compassion, etc. If person B was a bloke, OP would be told she did right, but if it was an elderly bloke and also shown another woman regardless of age, she would be called names.
Men are not expected to be nice to a chatty stranger. It wouldn’t matter regardless of gender who spoke to them because still in this day and age, their space is more important than a woman’s.
OP should have just said f**k off if she was going to be seen in the wrong regardless of how polite she was by some posters on here.