The usual group was in for bridge. They had been playing for about half an hour--that skinny Mrs. Cayley munching away daintily at all the richest cakes as if she thought they might put some decent flesh on her, Mrs. Munro making a great fuss about the fact that the special candies she was eating were non-nutritive and therefore non-fattening, the others just eating normally and too much as the mood struck them. Mrs. Munro was dummy, and by some shrewdly ill-timed advice managed to make her partner go down three. Her partner was furious but Mrs. Munro just giggled. "You'll never guess whom I saw with somebody else's wife," she said in her loud whisper. "Really?" said Mrs. Cayley. "Janet's husband?" "Not in a million years. It was _my_ husband!" Carrie sat up as if she had received an electric shock. This was a new sort of gossip. "Well, at least your Bruce has good taste in women," said Mrs. Cayley generously. "Now, when _my_ husband steps out--well, really, I'm ashamed of him. Of course, I suppose he does the best he can, poor dear." That was the way it went the rest of that afternoon. When Carrie thought back to it later she shuddered. She had never before taken part in such a gossip session and she hoped that she never would again. Each of them had chatted, not about some absent individual but about herself and her own relations. What skeletons had popped out of the closets! It was the morning after that Barbara's letter came. "We had the funniest basketball game last night," wrote Barbara. "Our team was playing the girls from State College and right in the middle of the game, when it was so exciting and we were all yelling like mad, our captain, instead of shooting at the basket, suddenly stopped and said, 'This is no fun, girls. Let's aim for something big.' "And she turned right around and threw the ball as hard as she could at Professor Hazlehurst's head, the one who teaches chemistry. You know--I've told you about him. And then all the players began to throw the ball at people in the crowd. "You can imagine the uproar! The referees were blowing their whistles and all the girls were yelling and rushing to get out and I was afraid some of them would get hurt. But at last President Newsom managed to quiet things down and they stopped the game. "They've called in Professor Griggs, who teaches Psychology, but she admits that she hasn't the slightest idea why it happened. Some of the girls say it was gamblers and they bribed the players but that's _so_ silly. Nobody ever bets on _our_ games. "It's just one of those mysteries that it looks as if they'll never solve." Carrie read with amazement, going back again and again to make sure that she hadn't misinterpreted Barbara's straggly script. She hadn't. Toward the end of the letter Barbara added something that surprised her almost as much as the account of the basketball game.