Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner keep a tiny basement shop near Stuyvesant Square in the horse-car New York of the 1870s, selling trimmings and sewing and living on very little. Ann Eliza buys her sister a clock for her birthday, and the shy German clockmaker Herman Ramy enters both their lives with consequences neither could foresee.
A bleak, beautifully observed novella of poverty and self-sacrifice, Wharton’s look at the New York far below society. Download the free EPUB.