She turned toward him and their eyes met. When her gaze turned away from him she was smiling.
"Yes. I'd like a cup of tea," she said after a moment of deliberation.
He didn't very well know this part of the city, but he remembered a restaurant he had once gone to with Flynn, the very one, it seems, where I had taken refuge. And there they were, looking at each other across the table, the girl, as Jerry expressed it, a little demure, a little quizzical, possibly a little upon the defensive, but friendly enough. If she hadn't been friendly, he argued, most properly, she wouldn't have come with him.
"I can't seem to think it's really you," Jerry began after he had given his order. "You're different somehow—soberer and a little pale."
"Am I?"
"Yes, I can't think just how I expected you to look in New York. Of course, you wouldn't wear leather gaiters, or carry a butterfly net. There aren't any butterflies in the Bowery, are there?"
"No—no butterflies." She paused a moment. "Only moths with singed wings."
She examined him furtively, but he was frankly puzzled.
"Moths—! I don't think I understand."
"Yes—moths—I—I spend a good deal of my time at the Blank Street Mission."