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hostile.
    "I don't know," I said. "Seems like a regular guy to me."
    "Well, a lot of the guys can't stand him. They say he's always talking about how his father is a big-time doctor, and who his father's patients are. Pretty obnoxious."
    "I don't know. I never heard anything like that." I decided, for the moment, not to mention Joe Louis.
    "Well, the fellows on the second floor want him to move, but the only way to get him out is to persuade him to switch rooms with someone else in the dorm. So far, nobody is willing to do it." There was a long pause. Dillard had stopped smiling a while ago. He took a deep breath. "Are you interested?"
    "Not me," I said. I sympathized with Vinnie's plight, but not
enough to become any kind of martyr. The only thing left for the fellows on the second floor to do to Vinnie was to set fire to his room.

    "There's a rumor going around that his old man's going to sue the school. Can you imagine? I tell you, these people are always looking for an edge. Anything to knock you off balance so they can get the upper hand. They never do anything like gentlemen. That's why you never see them in any of the better clubs or restaurants or anything. They're so pushy."
    Dillard was like most of the students at Draper, certain that the world, as it appeared through his bright, self-confident gaze, was a world his parents and grandparents and ancestors had bought and paid for, and, therefore, a world that he was able to see with unerring accuracy. And anyone who sought to be a part of that world required a pedigree. That left out Vinnie, and I suspected, me too. Dillard was like the white boys in the South who still believed in the legitimacy of the Confederacy, nearly a hundred years after the end of the Civil War. Boys whose heroes were Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, who considered Richmond the Capital City, and the South a land answerable only unto itself, with its own history and inviolate traditions. I had always felt like an outsider in that world, and now I was beginning to feel like an outsider in this one.
    "What do you think is going to happen?" I said.
    "I can't really say. I know Mr. Spencer's been spending a lot of time on it, but he says Vinnie's father is very tough to deal with. Very excitable. They say the Italians are all like that. Carrot said
they'll try to blackmail you if you're not careful. He said his father had a run-in with one of them over some real estate deal, and the guy threatened to go to the papers if his father backed out."

    I had seen Carrot around the campus after our first meeting, but I had avoided any direct contact with him. I was surprised to hear Dillard bring up his name, and I was curious about their relationship.
    "Is Carrot involved in this, too?" I asked.
    "Well, sort of," said Dillard. "A lot of the guys on the second floor look up to him, so Mr. Spencer asked him to have a word with them to get them to back off of Vinnie, until something could be worked out. Carrot's a good man. He just wants to do what's best for the school."
    "Did he talk to them?"
    "Yeah. He talked to them a couple of days ago, and things have been pretty quiet since then."
    The silence that followed gave each of us a chance to consider this last statement. Dillard had obviously offered it as proof that Vinnie's situation, with Carrot's intervention, was under control. But after seeing Carrot in action, I had my own ideas about what he had said to his friends on the second floor.
    "Have you seen the signs?" I asked.
    "Signs? What signs?"
    "In the bathroom on the second floor. There's one over a sink that says vinnie's sink and one on the door of a toilet stall that says vinnie's toilet. Rolf told Vinnie they took a vote and decided to assign Vinnie his own sink and toilet. He's the only one who's supposed to use them."

    Dillard grinned. "You're kidding. Why, that's hilarious." He slapped his knee with his hand. "These guys will try to make a joke out of anything."
    "I don't think