The first impression of Mr. Wilson at close quarters was to impair some but not all of these illusions.  His head and features were finely cut and exactly like his photographs, and the muscles of his neck and the carriage of his head were distinguished.  But, like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated; and his hands, though capable and fairly strong, were wanting in sensitiveness and finesse.  The first glance at the President suggested not only that, whatever else he might be, his temperament was not primarily that of the student or the scholar, but that he had not much even of that culture of the world which marks M. Clemenceau and Mr. Balfour as exquisitely cultivated gentlemen of their class and generation.  But more serious than this, he was not only insensitive to his surroundings in the external sense, he was not sensitive to his environment at all.  What chance could such a man have against Mr. Lloyd George’s unerring, almost medium-like, sensibility to every one immediately round him?  To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man’s buff in that party.  Never could a man have stepped into the parlor a more perfect and predestined victim to the finished accomplishments of the Prime Minister.  The Old World was tough in wickedness anyhow; the Old World’s heart of stone might blunt the sharpest blade of the bravest knight-errant.  But this blind and deaf Don Quixote was entering a cavern where the swift and glittering blade was in the hands of the adversary.

But if the President was not the philosopher-king, what was he?  After all he was a man who had spent much of his life at a University.  He was by no means a business man or an ordinary party politician, but a man of force, personality, and importance.  What, then, was his temperament?

The clue once found was illuminating.  The President was like a Nonconformist minister, perhaps a Presbyterian.  His thought and his temperament wore essentially theological not intellectual, with all the strength and the weakness of that manner of thought, feeling, and expression.  It is a type of which there are not now in England and Scotland such magnificent specimens as formerly; but this description, nevertheless, will give the ordinary Englishman the distinctest impression of the President.