“Uh, yeah,” I say.
She holds up a fat, tattered paperback. It’s alsoMiddlemarch.
“Oh shit,” I say. “You too?”
“It’s my favorite book! This is my mother’s copy from when she was in college. She almost named me Dorothea.”
“A bullet narrowly dodged.”
“Have you read it before?”
“First timer.”
“Ooh. What part are you on?”
“Casaubon’s dying. And not a moment too soon, in my opinion.”
She laughs. “Just you wait. He gets worse.”
“No spoilers, please. I’m reading it for the thrills.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I love it, actually. I’m trying to get through the classics, belatedly. Just finishedAnna Kareninaand was looking for something a bit more uplifting.”
“You must love a doomed bourgeois marriage.”
“Very much.”
“Not based on experience, I hope,” she says. And then she winces. “Sorry. That was rude.”
“Not at all.” I hold up my bare ring finger. “I’m as yet unwed.”
“Ah,” Hope says.
She doesn’t seem to know what to say next and I don’t want to stop talking to her so I say: “Are you?”
“Unhappily married?” she asks.
“Divorced.”
“Neither,” she says, “but I’m young yet.”
“Compared to the rest of the chaps on this boat, anyway.”
She laughs. She has a great laugh—full and earthy.
“So do you read a lot of nineteenth-century literature?” she asks, gesturing back at my book.
“I do lately. I started last year with the Brontës, then moved on to Jane Austen. Dickens will be next, when I finish the greatest hits of George Eliot.”
“Oh, you have so much to look forward to!” she says. “I’m a massive Brit Lit nerd. Studied it in college.”
I’m immediately self-conscious. As a man who did not even get through his A-levels in a family of people who all went to Cambridge and Oxford, I am, I’ll admit, insecure about my intellectual interests. It’s not that I don’t think I’m smart. It’s just that I know I’m not educated.
“Flattered on behalf of my culture,” I say.
“It’s funny we both have actual books. I usually read in audio.”
