For a while at Paris amid the triumphs of his European reception
and the successes of the first few months up to the adoption of the
League covenant Mr. Wilson forgot Mr. Lodge, forgot him too
completely.

It was my fortune to see him at the apex of his career. He was
about to sail for America on that visit which he made here in the
midst of the treaty making. His League covenant had just been
agreed to. The world had accepted him. Fate had led him far from
those paths of defeat and obscurity into which his sensitiveness
and shyness had turned him as a youth. He was elated and confident.
He looked marvelously fresh and young, his color warm and youthful,
his eye alive with pleasure.

He talked long and well, answered questions freely, told stories of
his associates at the peace table, especially of one who never read
the memoranda his secretaries prepared, who was so deaf that he
could not hear a word spoken in conference and who spoke so loudly
that no one could interrupt him. "What could one do," Mr. Wilson
asked, "to penetrate a mind like that?" M. Clemenceau, who unlike
this other commissioner, had eyes and saw not, had ears and neither
would he hear, had said to him once, in response to a firm
negative, "You have a heart of steel!" "I felt like replying to
him," flashed Mr. Wilson, "I have not the heart to steal!"

So well poised, so sure of himself he felt that he could do an
extraordinary thing. He could laugh off a mistake. Robuster natures
accept mistakes as a child accepts tumbles. Mistakes for Mr. Wilson
were ordinarily crises for his arrogancy.