The Pension Office was not built for balls, Inaugural or otherwise, and on the evening of March Fourth, 1909, after a day of melting sleet and snow, the entrance was not especially inviting. Neither was the dressing-room which had been assigned to me. I suppose that for years it had rung with the ceaseless click of scores of typewriters and that its walls had beheld no more elaborate costume than a business blouse and skirt since the occasion of the last Inaugural Ball which had marked the beginning of the second Roosevelt administration four years before. But as I needed to do very little “prinking” it really didn’t matter and I quickly rejoined the President and proceeded, on his arm, to the Presidential Box, this being a small round gallery above the main entrance of the great ballroom which is itself, in everyday life, the principal workroom of the Pension Office.

A brilliant, an almost kaleidoscopic scene spread before us. The hall is of tremendous proportions, pillared with red marble and with walls tinted in the same colour. Every inch of floor space seemed to be occupied. The bright colours and the gleam of women’s gowns met and clashed, or harmonised with the brighter colours of diplomatic uniforms. Officers of the Army and Navy, in full regalia, mingled with the hundreds of men in the plain black of formal evening dress. It was a wonderful glittering throng, more magnificent than any I have ever seen. It was not possible to distinguish individuals except in the space directly below the box, but there, as I looked down, I saw a great semicircle of faces⁠—thousands, it seemed to me⁠—smilingly upturned toward us. The din of human voices was terrific; even the loudest band procurable had difficulty in making itself heard. But the scene was so gay in colour, and the faces that gazed up at us were so friendly and happy that I felt elated and not at all overwhelmed.