Cicely and Other Stories — Reading Notes

The Hand of Douglas and the Eagle's View

In "The Hand of Douglas," the general consoles Mary Lee by quoting Browning's "Saul" and invoking the American eagle: "With wing on the wind, and eye on the sun, He swerves not a line." The passage is the collection's most explicit statement of its moral philosophy. The general urges Mary Lee to rise above petty social hollows, to take an eagle view rather than a sheep's perspective. The title phrase—"The hand of Douglas is his own"—becomes a motto for self-determination, the right to extend friendship across class lines. Yet the story does not resolve the tension between this ideal and the actual sting of exclusion. Mary Lee's tears, her wet ball of a handkerchief, and her instinctive trust in the old general suggest that the eagle view is easier to admire than to inhabit. Johnston leaves the reader with the advice, not its outcome.

Homeliness, Palmistry, and the Burden of Appearance

"Alida's Homeliness" and "Elsie's 'Palmistry Evening'" both hinge on physical appearance and its social consequences. Alida's plainness is presented as a fixed fact, a source of quiet pain that the story explores without promising transformation. In contrast, Elsie's palmistry evening turns a parlor game into a moment of self-revelation: the illustrations show characters "looking at her hand a dozen times a day" and hiding faces in roses. Johnston uses these concrete images—a hand studied, a face hidden—to externalize inner anxieties. The stories do not argue that beauty is unimportant; rather, they show how young women negotiate the gap between how they are seen and who they hope to be. The domestic settings—a dressmaking shop, a parlor, a boardinghouse—anchor these concerns in tangible, period-specific spaces.

Voices Passing Her Door: Sound and Silence

Johnston's prose is attentive to sound. The frontispiece caption, "There were voices passing her door," points to a recurring motif: overheard conversations, the whir of machines, the silence of a room after a cruel remark. In "Cicely," the noisy establishment contrasts with Cicely's interior ache. In "The Hand of Douglas," Mary Lee's sobs are interrupted by the general's deep voice. These auditory details create a texture of isolation and connection. Characters often listen before they speak, and their silences—the pause before an answer, the effort to keep sobs out of a reply—carry as much meaning as dialogue. Johnston does not overexplain these moments; she lets the reader hear the room. The result is a collection that feels acoustically alive, even in its quietest scenes.

Readers approaching these stories should attend to the small gestures and objects Johnston uses to signal inner states: a braid, a handkerchief, a bunch of roses. The moral lessons are delivered not through sermons but through the weight of a single line of poetry or the kindness of an old man. The collection rewards a slow reading that notices how characters hold their bodies, what they choose to say, and what they leave unsaid.

Years shelving stories of young women weighing pride against conscience, I often recall Annie Fellows Johnston’s quiet moral reckonings. There is a kinship with the delicate uncertainty in that old riddle of the tiger’s door—The Lady, or the Tiger? — Background and Themes—where choice itself hangs like a held breath. Both whisper of how character surfaces in the smallest pauses.