Two weeks passed.  Another invitation to lunch.  Sharp, the Ambassador to France, had arrived.  He, too, was invited.  Present:  the President, Mrs. Wilson, Mrs. Wallace, the Misses Smith of New Orleans, Miss Bones, Sharp, and I. Not one word about foreign affairs.

After luncheon, the whole party drove to the Capitol, where the President addressed Congress on the strike, proposing legislation to prevent it and to forestall similar strikes.  It is a simple ceremony and somewhat impressive.  The Senators occupy the front seats in the House, the Speaker presides and the President of the Senate sits on his right.  An escorting committee is sent out to bring the President in.  He walks to the clerk’s or reader’s desk below the presiding officer’s, turns and shakes hands with them both and then proceeds to read his speech, very clearly and audibly.  Some passages were applauded.  When he had done, he again shook hands with the presiding officer and went out, preceded and followed by the White House escort.  I sat in the Presidential (or diplomatic?) gallery with the White House party, higgledy-piggledy.

The speech ended, the President drove to the White House with his escort in his car.  The crowds in the corridors and about the doors waited and crowded to see Mrs. Wilson, quite respectful but without order or discipline.  We had to push our way through them.  Now and then a policeman at a distance would yell loudly, “Make way there!”

When we reached the White House, I asked the doorman if the President had arrived.

“Yes.”

“Does he expect me to go in and say good-bye?”

“No.”

Thus he had no idea of talking with me now, if ever.  Not at lunch nor after did he suggest a conversation about American-British affairs or say anything about my seeing him again.

This threatened strike does hold his whole mind—­bothers him greatly.  It seems doubtful if he can avert a general strike.  The Republicans are trying “to put him in a political hole,” and they say he, too, is playing politics.  Whoever be to blame for it, it is true that politics is in the game.  Nobody seems to foresee who will make capital out of it.  Surely I can’t.

There’s no social sense at the White House.  The President has at his table family connections only—­and they say few or no distinguished men and women are invited, except the regular notables at the set dinners—­the diplomatic, the judiciary, and the like.  His table is his private family affair—­nothing more.  It is very hard to understand why so intellectual a man doesn’t have notable men about him.  It’s the college professor’s village habit, I dare say.  But it’s a great misfortune.  This is one way in which Mr. Wilson shuts out the world and lives too much alone, feeding only on knowledge and subjects that he has already acquired and not getting new views or fresh suggestions from men and women.

He sees almost nobody except members of Congress for whom he sends for special conferences, and he usually sees these in his office.  The railroad presidents and men he met in formal conference—­no social touch.