the whole earth listened to him and followed him; an hour which
ended with him only dimly aware of his vision and furiously
conscious of pin pricks.

You observe this inadequacy in Mr. Wilson, this incapacity to
endure, at the outset of his career. It is characteristic of
certain temperaments that when they first face life they should run
away from it as Mr. Wilson did when, having studied law and having
been admitted to the bar, he abandoned practice and went to teach
in a girls' school. That was the early sign in him of that sense of
unfitness for the more arduous contacts of life which was so
conspicuous a trait during his presidency. He could not endure
meeting men on an equal footing, where there was a conflict of
wills, a rough clash of minds, where no concession was made to
sensitiveness and egotism.

Some nervous insufficiency causes this shrinking, like the quick
retreat from cold water of an inadequate body. Commonly a man who
runs away from life after the first contact with it hates himself
for his flight and there begins a conflict inside him which ends
either in his admission of defeat and acknowledgment of his
unfitness or in his convincing himself that his real motive was
contempt of that on which he turned his back. If he admits to
himself that he is really a little less courageous, a little more
sensitive, a little less at home in this world, then he is gone. If
he does satisfy himself that he is superior, has higher ideals,
worthier ends, despises the ordinary arts of success he becomes
arrogant, merely in self defense.

Mr. Wilson's "intellectual snobbism" was this kind of arrogance,