Little Miss By-The-Day — Reading Notes

The Voice That Everyone Imitates

The prologue emphasizes that those who spoke of Felicia Day unconsciously tried to mimic her “drawling voice.” Her speech is rendered in a distinctive phonetic spelling: “vairee,” “forevaire and more than evaire,” “jamais au grand.” This verbal tic is not merely decorative; it becomes a marker of her otherness, a way of marking her as someone who does not quite belong to the ordinary world of Brooklyn brownstones. The narrator notes that it was “quite a long time before I realized that everybody who spoke about her was unconsciously trying to imitate” her. The effect is that Felicia is remembered not just for what she did, but for how she sounded—a voice that lingers in the minds of those who heard it, even after she has vanished.

Hunger, Thievery, and a Dog Named Babiche

In a later excerpt, the seamstress Felicia Day is shown working in a house where an invalid’s lunch tray sits untouched. The narrative tracks time with increasing precision: “quarter of one,” “quarter past one,” “ten minutes past two.” The tray is described in lavish detail—crisp celery, currant jelly, browned chicken, creamy custard—while Felicia and her small dog Babiche have had nothing but “dry bits of lamb and the sad tomato” since leaving the House in the Woods. The tension builds through a series of small actions: Felicia mends socks, Babiche yelps, Felicia taps the dog with a thimble. At “seventeen minutes past three,” Felicia becomes a thief, eating the chicken and custard. Her reaction is not guilt but laughter: “Oh, Babiche! Aren't we delight-fully wicked!” The scene contrasts the narrator’s earlier romanticized view with a raw, physical need.

The House That Outlasts Its Owner

The prologue insists that Felicia Day “suddenly vanished, leaving nothing behind her save her delectable house.” The house itself is described as a relic of an earlier Brooklyn, with “great blocks of brownstone joined solidly” and wistaria vines stretching above cornices. It is juxtaposed with “six prim brownstones across the street” that look like toys. The narrator’s attempt to sketch its location on an envelope suggests a desire to fix something elusive in space. Yet the house remains, even after Felicia is gone, as a kind of monument to her presence. The prologue’s speaker admits to having passed it “a dozen times and shuddered,” hinting at an uncanny quality that persists. The house, like Felicia’s voice, becomes a trace of something that cannot be fully recovered.

Readers should pay attention to the way time is marked in the narrative—both the prologue’s retrospective longing and the scene’s minute-by-minute countdown to theft. The contrast between the romanticized, elusive Felicia of others’ memories and the hungry, laughing woman who eats a sick man’s lunch is the central tension of the work. The house in Brooklyn is not just a setting but a character in its own right, outlasting the person who gave it life.

Little Miss By-The-Day brought back my grandmother’s sewing basket—that scent of beeswax and old cotton. Her way of speaking, too, all quiet loops that meant more than they said. I felt that same ache reading A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill — Text and Context, where the hill itself seemed to hold its breath, waiting for someone to remember it properly.