Two sisters keep a small shop in a New York basement, selling artificial flowers and buttons, and buy a clock for a birthday — which means meeting the man who repairs it. Wharton, born into old New York money and the first woman to take the Pulitzer, wrote this novella early, could not place it for twenty years, and it is her only story of city poverty. It is also the best short work she did. Fifty-eight plates of New York street life by John Sloan and George Bellows, painted 1847 to 1924, give this tale of shopkeepers and tenements its city of brick and gaslight.
