“I expected you to stay a month,” he said. “So now you must stay for at least a week.” He picked up the bags, though his butler factotum hovered around anxious to help, and led the way to his old-fashioned touring car. And they stayed at his chalet, with its wide-spreading trees, its huge garden and its vineyard sloping down to the lake shore--they stayed a week. Gutzon had little trouble making sketches of his new subject. He had known Wilson fairly well; they had traveled the Atlantic in the same ship. Wilson had given him a degree at Princeton. They had seen much of each other when Gutzon was working on the decorations for the dormitory built by the class of 1879. And they had been close, though hardly harmonious, during the Borglum investigation of the aircraft scandal. However, to amplify his own impressions of Wilson’s characteristics, the sculptor wrote to several men who had known the President: Professor John Grier Hibben, the new president of Princeton University; William Allen White; President Coolidge; and several senators. He asked them to say frankly what characteristics he should portray. Wilson was then, as he still is, a subject of controversy. Gutzon got some amazing answers. President Coolidge thought he should be depicted as a kind of Abraham Lincoln. Senator William E. Borah thought that his features should express humanitarianism and said, “The Versailles Treaty was a cruel, destructive, brutal document. The only touches of humanity it contains were put there by Wilson.” And a senator who shall be nameless said, “I feel incapable of making a suggestion along this line. If I undertook to do so, I’m afraid I should bear in mind that a man who is untruthful, no matter how exalted his position, should not be deified in sculpture or otherwise.” Gutzon decided to represent Wilson slipping out of his Academic robes and standing alongside a martial female figure of Poland on the capitol steps. Poland, helmeted, was defending herself with a sword. Forced back she stood at bay under the President’s extended arm. It was a composition of great charm and historic truth. But it required more simple sentiment to be popular in Poznan, Poland, where it was to stand. Paderewski’s message of regret, contrived after he had looked at the photographs of the model, was a shock. He wired: