BUNNER SISTERS

BY EDITH WHARTON

PART I

I

In the days when New York's traffic moved at the pace of the

drooping horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the

Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River

School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an

inconspicuous shop with a single show-window was intimately and

favourably known to the feminine population of the quarter

bordering on Stuyvesant Square.

It was a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a sidestreet

already doomed to decline; and from 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 the uninitiated to guess

the precise nature of the business carried on within. But that was

of little consequence, since its fame was so purely local that the

customers on whom its existence depended were 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 brick front, green shutters on weak

hinges, and a dress-maker's sign in the window above the shop. On

each side of its modest three stories stood higher buildings, with

fronts of brown stone, cracked and blistered, cast-iron balconies

and cat-haunted grass-patches behind twisted railings. These

houses too had once been private, but now a cheap lunchroom filled

the basement of one, while the other announced itself, above the

knotty wistaria that clasped its central balcony, as the Mendoza

Family Hotel. It was obvious from the chronic cluster of refusebarrels

at its area-gate and the blurred surface of its curtainless

windows, that the families frequenting the Mendoza Hotel were not

exacting in their tastes; though they doubtless indulged in as much

fastidiousness as they could afford to pay for, and rather more

than their landlord thought they had a right to express.

These three houses fairly exemplified the general character of

the street, which, as it stretched eastward, rapidly fell from

shabbiness to squalor, with an increasing frequency of projecting

sign-boards, and of swinging doors that softly shut or opened at

the touch of red-nosed men and pale little girls with broken jugs.

The middle of the street was full of irregular depressions, well

adapted to retain the long swirls of dust and straw and twisted

paper that the wind drove up and down its sad untended length; and

toward the end of the day, when traffic had been active, the

fissured pavement formed a mosaic of coloured hand-bills, lids of

tomato-cans, old shoes, cigar-stumps and banana skins, cemented

together by a layer of mud, or veiled in a powdering of dust, as

the state of the weather determined.