"A great country! And that fellow Wilson, what a man!"
At present he believed the American people capable of accomplishing anything they set out to do, no matter how extraordinary; but his old-fashioned ideas prevented him from feeling sustained enthusiasm for anything collective and abstract, without human physiognomy. The former partisan of absolute monarchy, preferred individuals: one man to think for the rest, and give them orders. And after a few words, his enthusiasm for the American democracy began to shrink in scope until it rested in concentrated form on the head of Wilson.
"The greatest man in the world!"
His eyes moistened with idolatrous fervor as he read the President's speeches; he exhausted all his vocabulary of superlatives in expressing his admiration for the personage who had made a great people unsheath their swords, disinterestedly, in defense of justice and liberty, and who prophesied at the same time a future of peace for mankind, with no greedy nations to menace the life of the humble and the weak.
One evening he found a new phrase to express his admiration.
"What a poet!" Lubimoff, in spite of his melancholy, began to laugh. President Wilson a poet!
Don Marcos, stammering at the laughter of his Prince, tried to explain himself. Perhaps "poet" was not just the word to express his thought accurately. But poet he would call him nevertheless, and with good reason. A poet for the Colonel was a seer, who says very beautiful things about the future of mankind; a prophet who dreams upon his heights, embracing with his glance all that the common crowd swarming below cannot see; a being who, on speaking, in whatever form he may choose, succeeds in making people who are listening blink their eyes with emotion, while a shiver runs down their spines.
His tongue became twisted as he said this but above his stammering, arose a firm unshakable conviction.
"After all, I know what I mean. For me, he is a poet: a man who has wings ... very long wings."
The Prince began to laugh again. Wilson with wings! He imagined the President with his high hat, his glasses, and his kindly smile, and growing out from each shoulder of his long coat two enormous feathery triangles like those of the angels in religious paintings. What an amusing fellow the Colonel was!