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Then one day he called me up on the telephone, and made an appointment. His manner when I joined him was full of importance. "I want you at once," he said in a commanding tone, "to write me your cheque for a hundred dollars." "What's the matter?" I asked. "I am now able," said Ellesworth, "to put you in on the ground floor of one of the biggest things in years."
I have already many friends sitting on it; and others who have fallen through it into the basement. I said, "thank you," and he left me. "That was Ellesworth, wasn't it?" said a friend of mine who was near me. "Poor devil. I knew him slightly, always full of some new and wild idea of making money.
"Oh, yes," I said. I had seen companies promoted before. "Just now," continued Ellesworth, "I'm working on a thing that I think will be rather a big thing.
I didn't like the outlook. It was too narrow. The atmosphere cramped me. I want," he said, "a bigger horizon." "Quite so," I answered quietly. I had known men before who had lost their jobs. It is generally the cramping of the atmosphere that does it. Some of them can use up a tremendous lot of horizon. "At present," Ellesworth went on, "I am in finance. I'm promoting companies."
"The Slavs never forget what they owe to one another." Here Ellesworth drank a sip of tea and then said quietly, "Could you make it ten till Saturday at twelve?" I looked at him more closely. I noticed now his frayed cuffs and the dinginess of his over-brushed clothes. Not even the magnetism of his spectacles could conceal it.
I finally had to put it to them very straight that they must either stop shilly-shallying and declare themselves, or the whole business was off." "Did they declare themselves?" I questioned. "They did," said Ellesworth, "but I don't regret it. I'm working now on a much bigger thing, something with greater possibilities in it. When the right moment comes I'll let you in on the ground floor."
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