Edith Wharton

Bunner Sisters Edith Wharton

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 inthe sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy ofDesign, an inconspicuous shop with a single show-window was intimately andfavourably known to the feminine population of the quarter bordering onStuyvesant Square. It was a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a side-street already doomedto decline; and from the miscellaneous display behind the window-pane, and thebrevity of the sign surmounting it (merely "Bunner Sisters" in blotchy gold on ablack ground) it would have been difficult for the uninitiated to guess the precisenature of the business carried on within. But that was of little consequence, sinceits 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 BunnerSisters