"But your goldfish," Graham suggested, irritated by her constant dwelling on her husband.
"Well, Dick makes his bookkeepers keep track of my goldfish in the same way. I'm charged every hour of any of the ranch or house labor I use on the fish--postage stamps and stationery, too, if you please. I have to pay interest on the plant. He even charges me for the water, just as if he were a city water company and I a householder. And still I net ten per cent., and have netted as high as thirty. But Dick laughs and says when I've deducted the wages of superintendence--my superintendence, he means--that I'll find I am poorly paid or else am operating at a loss; that with my net I couldn't hire so capable a superintendent.
"Just the same, that's why Dick succeeds in his undertakings. Unless it's sheer experiment, he never does anything without knowing precisely, to the last microscopic detail, what it is he is doing."
"I never knew a man to be so sure of himself," Paula replied warmly; "and I never knew a man with half the warrant. I know him. He is a genius--but only in the most paradoxical sense. He is a genius because he is so balanced and normal that he hasn't the slightest particle of genius in him. Such men are rarer and greater than geniuses. I like to think of Abraham Lincoln as such a type."
"I must admit I don't quite get you," Graham said.
"Oh, I don't dare to say that Dick is as good, as cosmically good, as Lincoln," she hurried on. "Dick _is_ good, but it is not that. It is in their excessive balance, normality, lack of flare, that they are of the same type. Now I am a genius. For, see, I do things without knowing how I do them. I just do them. I get effects in my music that way. Take my diving. To save my life I couldn't tell how I swan-dive, or jump, or do the turn and a half.
"Dick, on the other hand, can't do anything unless he clearly knows in advance _how_ he is going to do it. He does everything with balance and foresight. He's a general, all-around wonder, without ever having been a particular wonder at any one thing.--Oh, I know him. He's never been a champion or a record-breaker in any line of athletics. Nor has he been mediocre in any line. And so with everything else, mentally, intellectually. He is an evenly forged chain. He has no massive links, no weak links."