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"Thanks," I said, "the ground floor is no place for me." "Don't misunderstand me," said Ellesworth. "This is a big thing. It's an idea I've been working on for some time, making refined sugar from the huckleberry crop. It's a certainty. I can get you shares now at five dollars.
Then I met him on the street, and he said that Persia was disintegrating, and took from me a dollar and a half. When I passed him next in the street he was very busy amalgamating Chinese tramways. It appeared that there was a ground floor in China, but I kept off it. Each time I saw Ellesworth he looked a little shabbier than the last.
Why not drop all this idea of quick money? There's nothing in it. The business world has grown too shrewd for it. Take an ordinary decent job and stick to it. Let me use my influence," I added, "to try and get you into something with a steady salary, and with your brains you're bound to get on in time." Ellesworth looked pained. A "steady job" sounded to him like a "ground floor" to me.
"Do you really think it possible? No, I couldn't." "You must remember," Ellesworth went on, "Russia means to reach out and take all she can get;" and he added, "how about fifteen till Friday?" "She may reach for it," I said, "but I doubt if she'll get anything. I'm sorry. I haven't got it." "You're forgetting the Bulgarian element," he continued, his animation just as eager as before.
"It's a small club and rather inconvenient," Ellesworth was saying, "and the horizon of some of its members rather narrow," here he nodded to me as he passed, "but I can give you a fairly decent lunch." I watched them as they disappeared upstairs. "That's Ellesworth, isn't it?" said a man near me. It was the same man who had asked about him before. "Yes," I answered.
They'll go to five hundred when we put them on the market, and I can run you in for a block of stock for promotion services as well. All you have to do is to give me right now a hundred dollars, cash or your cheque, and I can arrange the whole thing for you." I smiled. "My dear Ellesworth," I said, "I hope you won't mind if I give you a little bit of good advice.
I thanked him and we parted. The next time I saw Ellesworth he told me at once that he regarded Albania as unable to stand by itself. So I gave him five dollars on the spot and left him. A few days after that he called me up on the telephone to tell me that the whole of Asia Minor would have to be redistributed. The redistribution cost me five dollars more.
He was talking to me the other day of the possibility of cornering all the huckleberry crop and making refined sugar. Isn't it amazing what fool ideas fellows like him are always putting up to business men?" We both laughed. After that I didn't see Ellesworth for some weeks. Then I met him in the club again. How he paid his fees there I do not know.
Perhaps I had been forgetting something, whether the Bulgarian element or not. I compromised at ten dollars till Saturday. "The Slav," said Ellesworth, as he pocketed the money, "is peculiar. He never forgets." "What are you doing now?" I asked him. "Are you still in insurance?" I had a vague recollection of him as employed in that business. "No," he answered. "I gave it up.
I hadn't seen Ellesworth since our college days, twenty years before, at the time when he used to borrow two dollars and a half from the professor of Public Finance to tide him over the week end. Then quite suddenly he turned up at the club one day and had afternoon tea with me.
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