Bunner Sisters: Large Print

In the days when New York's traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, whensociety applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets ofthe Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuousshop with a single show-window was intimately and favourably known to the femininepopulation of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square.It was a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a side-street already doomed todecline; and from the miscellaneous display behind the window-pane, and the brevity ofthe sign surmounting it (merely "Bunner Sisters" in blotchy gold on a black ground) itwould have been difficult for the uninitiated to guess the precise nature of the businesscarried on within. But that was of little consequence, since its fame was so purely local thatthe customers on whom its existence depended were almost congenitally aware of theexact range of "goods" to be found at Bunner Sisters'.The house of which Bunner Sisters had annexed the basement was a private dwellingwith a brick front, green shutters on weak hinges, and a dress-maker's sign in the windowabove the shop. On each side of its modest three stories stood higher buildings, with frontsof brown stone, cracked and blistered, cast-iron balconies and cat-haunted grass-patchesbehind twisted railings. These houses too had once been private, but now a cheaplunchroom filled the basement of one, while the other announced itself, above the knottywistaria that clasped its central balcony, as the Mendoza Family Hotel. It was obvious fromthe chronic cluster of refuse-barrels at its area-gate and the blurred surface of itscurtainless windows, that the families frequenting the Mendoza Hotel were not exacting intheir tastes; though they doubtless indulged in as much fastidiousness as they could affordto pay for, and rather more than their landlord thought they had a right to express.