"Along with the university and your uncle's wishes, I feel obliged to point out that you are doing violence in another place as well."

I looked all around the room. Under my chair, even.

"I give up," I said.

"Yourself."

"Myself?"

"Yourself. By accepting the easy economic security of the situation, you are yielding to inertia. You are ruining your chances of ever really amounting to anything. You are growing in your dronehood."

"Dronehood?"

"Dronehood. Hanging around and not doing anything."

"So you are really acting in my best interests if you succeed in kicking me out, huh?"

"Precisely."

"I hate to tell you, but history is full of people like you. We tend to judge them harshly."

"History?"

"Not the department. The phenomenon."

He sighed and shook his head. He accepted my card, leaned back, puffed on his pipe, began to study what I had written.

I wondered whether he really believed he was doing me a favor by trying to destroy my way of life. Probably.

"Wait a minute," he said. "There's a mistake here."

"No mistake."

"The hours are wrong."

"No. I need twelve and there are twelve."

"I'm not disputing that, but-"

"Six hours, personal project, interdisciplinary, for art history credit, on site, Australia in my case."

"You know it should really be anthropology. But that would complete a major. But that's not what I'm-"

"Then three hours of comparative lit with that course on the troubadours. I'm still safe with that, and I can catch it on video-the same as with that one-hour current events thing for social-science credit. Safe there, and that's ten hours. Then two hours' credit for advanced basket weaving, and that's twelve. Home free."

"No, sir! You are not! That last one is a three-hour course, and that gives you a major in it!"