Neither the newspapers nor Carrie ever managed to get straight at exactly what point things had begun to go wrong. When they tried to trace the events of that day practically all the distinguished visitors, including two college presidents, the president of the Board of Education, a Professor of Educational Psychology and two heads of Normal Schools gave different and conflicting stories. What did come out, however, was that all six visitors had distinguished themselves in a quite unexpected way. They had run around the school madly waving torches and yelling, "Down with school! Down with school! Burn the place down!" The firemen had arrived in time to prevent much damage but the incendiaries had been rounded up only with great difficulty after school had been dismissed. The President of the Board of Education had beaten up the Superintendent and the two college presidents had ganged up on one of the hastily summoned policemen. Later on they could give no reason for why they had done so. "It's a crazy world," thought Carrie wisely. "You never know what sort of lunatic you'll run into next." And then she put it out of her mind and turned to a more important problem. What could she have for dinner that night that would please Bill and not make him say, "You _know_ I never eat spinach,"--or broccoli or her new sauce or whatever it was he was never eating that week? All the same it didn't surprise her greatly when Bill came home the day after and said, "You'll never guess what happened at the office." "Somebody else went crazy." "Nobody went crazy. We all slept." "What?" "We all slept. At ten o'clock Mr. Elvergard came in and said, 'All right, boys and girls, we've been working too hard, all of us. Let's take a nice long rest today, shall we? Put your pretty little heads on your pretty little desks. One, two, three, snooze!'" "You're joking!" "Cross my heart and hope to die. We all fell asleep and we stayed asleep till four-thirty and then he woke us up and sent us home early so we wouldn't get caught in the worst of the subway rush." Carrie looked at him and said absolutely nothing. What had happened at school had been bad enough. But this was absolutely incredible. There were times when Bill was a great kidder and she wasn't sure whether to take him seriously or not. This appeared to be one of the times when he was not to be taken seriously. Even if there were the faintest chance that he was telling the truth she thought it best not to encourage him by pretending to believe a story like _that_. It was harder, however, to take things as a joke when something just as silly happened to her. In this case she could remember almost every word exactly, without having the slightest idea of what had caused the whole conversation to take so unexpected a turn.