He did not know what it could be; he did not know that there was anything--but oddly the memory of his mother's white face back in the long ago, and of her tone when she said, "Oh, God, please!" came back and fitted themselves to the look in this woman's eyes.
Bud sat down on his canvas-wrapped bed and lifted his hat to rumple his hair and then smooth it again, as was his habit when worried.

He looked at the cookie, and because he was hungry he ate it with a foolish feeling that he was being sentimental as the very devil, thinking how her hands had touched it.

He rolled and smoked a cigarette afterwards, and wondered who she was and whether she was married, and what her first name was.
A quiet smoke will bring a fellow to his senses sometimes when nothing else will, and Bud managed, by smoking two cigarettes in rapid succession, to restore himself to some degree of sanity.
"Funny how she made me think of mother, back when I was a kid coming up from Texas," he mused.

"Mother'd like her." It was the first time he had ever thought just that about a girl.

"She's no relation to Honey," he added.