The Wings of the Dove

I think this is the best one yet. While traveling with Mrs. Stringham, Millie suddenly decides she needs to see a doctor. James sets this one up beautifully beginning with Millie asking Mrs. Stringham if the doctor back in New York had shared any secrets with her. The point being to make it clear that this is the reverse of the clichéd story wherein the older companion knows the girl is fatally ill but the girl herself is being sheltered from the truth. It is the girl, the sacrificial victim, who will tell her companion.

Anyway, the lovely moment comes when Mrs. Stringham is contemplating how easily this subject is coming up:

She produced this last consideration with such gaiety that Mrs. Stringham was not again disconcerted by it,was in fact quite ready—if talk of early dying was in order—to match it from her own future. Good, then; they would eat and drink because of what might happen tomorrow; and they would direct their course from that moment with a view to such eating and drinking. (and page 99 in my edition)

The reference here, of course, is Isaiah (22: 13)

Let us eat and drink;
for tomorrow we shall die.

All of which got me wondering whether the Christ figure in literature is a modern thing. People in the past did speak of imitating Christ, of course, but is the literary figure who is meant to recall Christ a modernist phenomenon? I don't know.

In any case, Millie is being set up as such. In this chapter (chapter 6) Millie goes off to sit on a mountain top alone, then returns and tells Mrs. Stringham that something is up and then they discuss the possibility of her dying, wait for it, at supper. James, as I say, is fairly beating us over the head with this.

By the way, there are a couple of earlier references that I haven't had time to enter yet. I'll get them in tomorrow.