"Let that take care of itself. I'll deliver the goods."
She allowed herself a smile. "They are not delivered?"
He flushed at this. "You think they never will be? Very well, I'll fight it out alone. At least I believe in myself."
"But what's happened? What do you mean, after all?" She put her hand upon his arm as he passed. He flung himself into a chair opposite her, his own elbows on the table as he faced her.
"You can't understand it, Laura; but listen. There are two ways of getting rich. You can make money without brains in real estate, other people building you up rich. That's luck, not brains. A great many of the great fortunes—take Astor's, for instance, in New York—have been made in that way. But that's a fortune which you O.K. after it's made, and you don't know anything about it in advance—it's too far in the future. You don't hear of the ones that are not made. Astor used his best judgment and bought land up the island, where he thought people would go, but he didn't know they'd go there. That's as much luck as brains. We call luck brains when it makes good.
"But there's another way of getting rich. That means real brains, and not luck. It means deliberately figuring out what people are going to do. There is only so much room on the surface of the earth. But there's room in the air for millions and millions of basic ideas."
He gloomed across at her, but she kindled, as ready as ever to travel with his thought.
"Look at a few of the big ideas which have paid," he said. "Give the people something they haven't had; get them so they have to have it! Cinch it first, and sell it afterward—and you're going to get rich. Granted an idea which takes hold on the daily life of the whole people, and there's no way of measuring the money you can make.
"For instance, you couldn't put the world back to the place where it could get along without refined oil, without steam and electric transportation, and the telephone, and a thousand other things which have made men rich—inventions which seemed little at first, but which were universal after a while. Oil, water, iron, wood, steel—we have to have those things. Cinch them and sell them. That's the way to get rich, my dear. Get an idea, get to it first, and cinch it for your own. Then sell it. Keep on selling it. Give 'em something they've got to have, after showing 'em they've got to have it. Teach 'em what they ought to have known without any teaching. Some men teach and others pay them for it. After that, all you've got to do is to take it away from them. When you've taken away enough, make 'em crawl—make 'em admit that you were greater than they were. Then build your monument and make them keep on remembering you. After that—"
"And after that, John?" she said gently.