The Living Present by Gertrude Atherton

I

Aside from the industrial class the women who suffered most at the outbreak of the war were those that worked in the shops. Paris is a city of little shops. The average American tourist knows them not, for her hectic experiences in the old days were confined to the Galeries Lafayette, the Louvre, the Bon Marche, and the Trois Quartiers. But during the greater part of 1915 street after street exhibited the dreary picture of shuttered windows, where once every sort of delicate, solid, ingenious, costly, or catch-penny ware was displayed. Some of these were closed because the owner had no wife, many because the factories that supplied them were closed, or the workmen no longer could be paid.