8.—The Ground Floor
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.
His big clean shaven face had lost nothing of its impressiveness, and his spectacles had the same glittering magnetism as in the days when he used to get the college bursar to accept his note of hand for his fees.
And he was still talking European politics just as he used to in the days of our earlier acquaintance.
“Mark my words,” he said across the little tea-table, with one of the most piercing glances I have ever seen, “the whole Balkan situation was only a beginning. We are on the eve of a great pan-Slavonic upheaval.” And then he added, in a very quiet, casual tone: “By the way, could you let me have twenty-five dollars till to-morrow?”
“A pan-Slavonic movement!” I ejaculated. “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.”