Fahrenheit 451

What does this passage mean? I am having a hard time understanding it!

Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women’s faces as he had once looked at the face of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colorful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay.

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In context, Montag is remembering his childhood. Like the enameled faces of the saints, Mildred's friends mean nothing to him. He is unable to connect to them in any way, personal or otherwise. They are merely there, totally unaffected by the world around them, concerned only with themselves.

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Fahrenheit 451