Eleanor is a milliner who rents commercial space from Louis and Joe on the ground floor of Adeline’s boarding house.

When the yellow fever epidemic arrives, Eleanor must decide whether she should close the shop and attempt to evacuate (meaning months of lost income), or ride out the fever.

"The yellow fever panic has driven nearly all our customers away and caused a rigid quarantine to be enforced all around us, which must almost paralyze the general trade of New Orleans while it lasts... At present everything is excessively dull, the city seems dead & one does not know what to do.”
-A letter by Thomas C, Porteous, a New Orleans merchant, to a Paris business associate, August 3, 1878 from The Saffron Scourge