Mr. Harding is a handsome man, endowed with the gifts that
reinforce the charm of his exterior, a fine voice, a winning smile,
a fluency of which his inaugural is the best instance; an ample
man, you might say. But he is too handsome, too endowed, for his
own good, his own spiritual good. The slight stoop of his
shoulders, the soft figure, the heaviness under the eyes betray in
some measure perhaps the consequences of nature's excessive
generosity. Given all these things you take, it may be, too much
for granted. There is not much to stiffen the mental, moral, and
physical fibers.

Given such good looks, such favor from nature, and an environment
in which the struggle is not sharp and existence is a species of
mildly purposeful flanerie. You lounge a bit stoop-shoulderedly
forward to success. There is nothing hard about the President. I
once described him in somewhat this fashion to a banker in New York
who was interested in knowing what kind of a President we had.

"You agree," he said, "with a friend of Harding's who came in to
see me a few days ago. This friend said to me 'Warren is the best
fellow in the world. He has wonderful tact. He knows how to make
men work with him and how to get the best out of them. He is
politically adroit. He is conscientious. He has a keen sense of his
responsibilities. He has unusual common sense.' And he named other
similar virtues, 'Well,' I asked him, 'What is his defect?' 'Oh,'
he replied, 'the only trouble with Warren is that he lacks
mentality.'"

The story, like most stories, exaggerates. The President has the
average man's virtues of common sense and conscientiousness with