deLint and Steeply courtside

deLint, coaching the journalist Steeply on how to extract anything from the Headmaster, describes the family's public face as constitutionally unpinnable: you have to "back into a Yes-No corner" and demand a straight answer, and even for a professional interrogator "It takes about twenty minutes if you're sharp." The point of the sighting is the gatekeeping — no one has ever been allowed to interview a kid here "while he's still in training," and "versus Tavis this is an exception your even getting in." The Claudius-administrator runs the family's outer wall: the youngest son sealed off from the press, every answer diffused into twenty minutes of nothing, access itself a thing Tavis grants and withholds.