"Richard Paul Russo - Nobodys Fool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

listening. For instance, she would have liked to tell the young man
who tasted his glove and made a face that she considered him to be
entirely typical of this deluded era. If there was a recurring motif
in today's world, a world Miss Beryl, at age eighty, was no longer sure
she was in perfect step with, it was cavalier open-mindedness.

"How do you know what it's like if you don't try it?" was the way so
many young people put it. To Miss Beryl's way of thinking--and she
prided herself on being something of a free- thinker--you often could
tell, at least if you were paying attention, and the man who'd just
tasted the inside of the tree and made a face had no more reason to be
disappointed than her friend Mrs. Gruber, who'd announced in a loud
voice in the main dining room of the Northwoods Motor Inn that she
didn't care very much for either the taste or the texture of the snail
she'd just spit into her napkin. Miss Beryl had been unmoved by her
friend's grimace.

"What was there about the way it looked that made you think it would be
good?" Mrs. Gruber had not responded to this question. Having spit
the snail into the napkin, she'd become deeply involved with the
problem of what to do with the napkin.

"It was gray and slimy and nasty looking," Miss Beryl reminded her
friend. Mrs.

Gruber admitted this was true, but went on to explain that it wasn't so
much the snail itself that had attracted her as the name.

"They got their own name in French," she reminded Miss Beryl,
stealthily exchanging her soiled cloth napkin for a fresh one at an
adjacent table.

"Escayot." There's also a word in English, Miss Beryl had pointed out.
Snail. Probably horse doo had a name in French also, but that didn't
mean God intended for you to eat it.



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Still, she was privately proud other friend for trying the snail, and
she had to acknowledge that Mrs. Gruber was more adventurous than most
people, including two named Clive, one of whom she'd been married to,
the other of whom she'd brought into the world. Where was the middle
ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense? Now there
was a human question.

The man who tasted the inside of the elm must have been an even bigger
fool than Mrs. Gruber, Miss Beryl decided, for he'd no sooner made the