Chapter 1

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