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