Edith Wharton

Bunner Sisters Edith Wharton

In the days when New York's traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, when societyapplauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets of the HudsonRiver School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuous shop with a singleshow-window was intimately and favourably known to the feminine population of the quarterbordering on Stuyvesant Square. It was a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a side-street already doomed to decline; andfrom the miscellaneous display behind the window-pane, and the brevity of the sign surmounting it(merely "Bunner Sisters" in blotchy gold on a black ground) it would have been difficult for theuninitiated to guess the precise nature of the business carried on within. But that was of littleconsequence, since its fame was so purely local that the customers on whom its existence dependedwere almost congenitally aware of the exact range of "goods" to be found at Bunner Sisters'. The house of which Bunner Sisters had annexed the basement was a private dwelling with a brickfront, green shutters on weak hinges, and a dress-maker's sign in the window above the shop. Oneach side of its modest three stories stood higher buildings, with fronts of brown stone, cracked andblistered, cast-iron balconies and cat-haunted grass-patches behind twisted railings. These housestoo had once been private, but now a cheap lunchroom filled the basement of one, while the otherannounced itself, above the knotty wistaria that clasped its central balcony, as the Mendoza FamilyHotel. It was obvious from the chronic cluster of refuse-barrels at its area-gate and the blurredsurface of its curtainless windows, that the families frequenting the Mendoza Hotel were notexacting in their tastes; though they doubtless indulged in as much fastidiousness as they couldafford to pay for, and rather more than their landlord thought they had a right to express.