In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

"What are you writing?" Penny asked him as he hoisted the bag
onto the empty chair.
"It's a long story, an' I have to go back to my place and meet a
girl. But come by again, I'm always here, name's Pete." He stuck out his
one hand.
"I'm Penny and this is Sandro." Penny, then Sandro shook his
hand.
The coffees came with the little chocolate covered walnuts.
Penny thought of the walnut ice cream in Rome as she nibbled.
Pete gathered all his papers and clipboard and stuffed them into
his laundry bag, said buona notte, and left, lugging the bag.
"How did he know you were Italian?"
"Sciocchezza!"
"Skoozy?"
"That immortal merda Ula's reading."
"Let's go to Shakespeare's."
The Latin Quarter streets were full of students and tourists
hitting the couscous joints. They turned a corner and in a dip by the
river was the book store.
Penny didn't know exactly what she had in mind, but this
seemed like the right kind of place. The shop was crowded with a maze
of teetering bookcases winding into ever smaller back rooms. She
edged herself past the loud tourists in the front to the back where
dazed and confused types sleepwalked along the ragged green carpet,
and serious poseurs leaned against shelves or on the steps leafing
through heavy books. Ula would've fit right in. All in all, the place gave
Penny the creeps.
A shelf with Huxley, Castenada, Leary and McKenna looked
promising. What she wanted was something of an anthropological
overview to illuminate the stuff she had read in the Immortal Sisters
book with its allusions to special mushrooms and starvation diets of
raw grasses and altered states.
Bingo. The Long Trip, a Prehistory of Psychedelia. She looked
up Eleusis, Ergot, Stropharia cubensis. It was all there in this dog eared
paperback, probably left here by some weary burnt out hippie. Exactly
what she was looking for, except for the tech stuff, but the book
predated that.
Sandro found her propped against a shelf and dropped
something into her hand. A foil wrapped walnut.
He started laughing and hugged her.
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