Mrs. St. John Deloraine. But as she never for a moment
suspected their wiles, so these devices were entirely wasted on her, and
her least warrantable admirers found that she insisted on accepting
them as endowed with all the Christian virtues. Just as some amateurs of
music are incapable of conceiving that there breathes a man who has no
joy in popular concerts (we shall have popular conic sections next),
so Mrs. St John Deloraine persevered in crediting all she met with a
passion for virtue. Their speech might bewray them as worldlings of the
world, but she insisted on interpreting their talk as a kind of harmless
levity, as a mere cynical mask assumed by a tender and pious nature.
Thus, no one ever combined a delight in good works with a taste for good
things so successfully as Mrs. St John Deloraine.

At this moment the lady's "favorite vanity," in the matter of good
works, was _The Bunhouse_. This really serviceable, though quaint,
institution was not, in idea, quite unlike Maitland's enterprise of
the philanthropic public-house, the _Hit or Miss_. In a slum of Chelsea
there might have been observed a modest place of entertainment, in the
coffee and bun line, with a highly elaborate Chelsea Bun painted on the
sign. This piece of art, which gave its name to the establishment, was
the work of one of Mrs. St John Deloraine's friends, an artist of the
highest promise, who fell an early victim to arrangements in haschisch
and Irish whiskey. In spite of this ill-omened beginning, _The Bunhouse_
did very useful work. It was a kind of unofficial club and home, not for
Friendly Girls, nor the comparatively subdued and domesticated slavery
of common life, but for the tameless tribes of young women of the
metropolis. Those who disdain service, who turn up expressive features
at sewing machines, and who decline to stand perpendicularly for fifteen
hours a day in shops--all these young female outlaws, not professionally
vicious, found in _The Bunhouse_ a kind of charitable shelter and home.

They were amused, they were looked after, they were encouraged not to
stand each other drinks, nor to rival the profanity of their brothers
and fathers. "Places" were found for them, in the rare instances when
they condescended to "places." Sometimes they breakfasted at _The
Bunhouse_, sometimes went there to supper. Very often they came in a
state of artificial cheerfulness, or ready for battle. Then there would
arise such a disturbance as