Bunner Sisters | Page 3

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Wharton, Edith. "Bunner Sisters." Scribner's Magazine 60 (Oct. 1916):
439-58; 60 (Nov. 1916): 575-96.

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 side- street 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 refuse- barrels 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.
The sole refuge offered from the contemplation of this depressing
waste was the sight of the Bunner Sisters' window. Its panes were
always well-washed, and though their display of artificial flowers,
bands of scalloped flannel, wire hat-frames, and jars of home-made
preserves, had the undefinable greyish tinge of objects long preserved
in the show-case of a museum, the window revealed a background of
orderly counters and white-washed walls in pleasant contrast to the
adjoining dinginess.
The Bunner sisters were proud of the neatness of their shop and content
with its humble prosperity. It was not what they had once imagined it

would be, but though it presented but a shrunken image of their earlier
ambitions it enabled them to pay their rent and keep themselves alive
and out of debt; and it was long since their hopes had soared higher.
Now and then, however, among their greyer hours there came one not
bright enough to be called sunny, but rather of the silvery twilight hue
which sometimes ends a day of storm. It was such an hour that Ann
Eliza, the elder of the firm, was soberly enjoying as she sat one January
evening in the back room which served as bedroom, kitchen and
parlour to herself and her sister Evelina. In the shop the blinds had been