Like Yiyun Li, I was struck by the final two sentences of chapter 6.
But if Tom had told his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have said, “I’d do just the same again.” That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions; whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different.
I’m like Maggie, by the way. I love Eliot for making Maggie so relatable. When I meet characters in literature introduced as sharp-smart-intelligent-genius I usually expect them to be right about everything and therefore dull. Maggie doesn’t know-it-all. She reads. Good.