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--I forget where she was going--had brought her bag and come right to my office and sat down to wait for me. So when I came in, they were both there, and of course I told them all I knew which I had learned at Cabinet meeting, and we talked about it a while. But it was a very distressing situation.
The people on the streets as we drove from the White House over--they were just standing in little knots on the street. Utter strangers were speaking to each other. And there was the sense of a dead city. There was a hush over everything, and people were just sort of looking at each other in horror and saying what they had to say.
I drove to the office. We didn't seem to know what to do. I mean, it was one of those situations where you don't know what to do with yourself. You can't go back to work. You just can't act as though nothing had happened. We couldn't think of food.
I said to Gertrude, “You'll spend the night with me?”
“All right,” she said. “I will.”
I said, “Perhaps we ought to go and get something to eat. It's quite late, and perhaps we need food.”
She said, “Well, sure. What about going over to the Carleton and getting a bite?”
And I said, “All right. I left something there and I've got to pick it up.
So we went over to the Carleton. Now, that was a queer thing to do, although it's a small dining-room and we went there
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