The essential talent there is not intelligence, in which I outpaced him handily from my first burblings, but the ability to ask the right questions of the world. While Humphrey made the mechanistic inquiries best suited to a future grease monkey of industry—How does this work? How may it someday work for me?—I posed to our father the philosopher’s riddle, why: What’s all the fuss? Why even bother? A reasonable concern, I felt, since we already had a greater fortune than we knew what to do with.
