As my husband had an engagement to attend a “smoker” which was being given to him at the New Willard Hotel by a large gathering of Yale men, the party broke up very early and, as soon as the last of the guests had gone, I went immediately to my rooms. We had been assigned to the suite in the southeast corner, known in the White House as the Blue Bedroom.

This Blue Bedroom gave me food for interesting reflection. Conspicuous, under the mantel against the side wall, I found, on a bronze plate, the following inscription (which I read as I struggled with my hooks): “In this room Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, whereby four million slaves were given their freedom and slavery forever prohibited in these United States.” It is only a state bedroom now, having been made so by the plans of the McKim restoration which was accomplished during the Roosevelt administration, but it was once Lincoln’s Cabinet room, a room in which he lived through many terrible days during the Civil War. It seemed strange to spend my first night in the White House surrounded by such ghosts.

I went to bed reasonably early, hoping that I might have a good, long sleep and get up refreshed and ready for an eventful day. But the press of circumstances was against me. My mind was never more wide awake. In spite of my determination to rest, I went carefully over the whole Inaugural programme. I wondered if this had been done, if that had been attended to. I worried over many petty details with which I had no reason to be concerned. I suppose I must have been excited, a condition quite rare with me, but then, too, the weather had something to do with it. Never was seen such a night in Washington. It will be remembered that Mr. Moore, the Chief of the Weather Bureau, had prophesied that the storm of the third would pass and that the Fourth of March would dawn as clear and bright as any Inaugural Committee could wish. He made himself very popular with the anxious officials, who were expending their energies in the preparation of a fair weather programme, but his popularity was short lived. He afterward learnedly explained that some wholly unprecedented thing had happened in the wind currents, causing a “flareback”⁠—whatever that may be. It was a memorable “flareback” in any event, not to be forgotten by those who were so seriously inconvenienced by its results.