"How far beyond Vediamnum does he live?" Tanno enquired.
"On the other side of the Vedian lands," I explained. "His property is over the divide towards the Tolenus, in between Villa Vedia and Villa Aemilia."
Entedius it was, as I made sure, when he drew nearer, by his magnificent black mare. He covered the last hundred paces at a furious gallop, pulled up his snorting mare abruptly, and dismounted jauntily. Plainly, at first sight, he and Tanno liked each other. When I had introduced them they looked each other up and down appraisingly, Entedius appearing to relish Tanno's swarthy vigor, warm coloring and exuberant health as much as did Tanno his hard-muscled leanness and weather-beaten complexion.
"Are you any relation to Entedia Jucunda?" Tanno queried.
"Very distant," Hirnio replied, "very distant indeed: too far for us to call each other 'cousin.' When I am in Rome I always call on her; once in a while she invites me to one of her very big dinners; otherwise we never see each other."
Almost before they had exchanged greetings Mallius Vulso rounded the house from the east and then Neponius Pomplio from the west; after he had been presented, the two other Satronians, Bultius Seclator and Juventius Muso, cantered up, followed closely by Fisevius Rusco and Lisius Naepor, both adherents of the Vedian side of the feud.
As soon as the stable-boys had led off their horses we started bathwards, delayed a moment by the arrival of a slave of Entedius, on a mule, leading another heavily laden with two packs. We made a quick bath, with no loitering, and at once went in to dinner. My uncle had been to the last degree conservative and old-fashioned. He would have nothing to do with any new inventions, save his own. So he would not hear of any alterations in the furnishings of his villa, except those suggested by his ideas of sanitation. Otherwise it had been kept just as my grandfather had left it to him. In particular uncle could not be brought to like the newly popular C-shaped dining sofas, which all Rome and all fashionables all over Italy and the provinces had so acclaimed and so promptly adopted along with circular-topped dining-tables. My triclinium still held grandfather's square-topped table and the three square sofas about it. Uncle's will, in fact, had stipulated that no furnishings of the villa must be altered within five years of the date of his death. As I had to adjust my formal dinners to the old style, I was not only delighted to have Tanno with us for himself and for his jollity, but also because he just made up the nine diners demanded by ancient convention.
Agathemer had asked me, as a special favor, to leave the decoration of the triclinium entirely to him, and I had agreed, when he fairly begged me, not to enter the triclinium or even pass its door, after my noonday siesta. When I did enter it with my guests I was dazzled. The sun had just set and the northwestern sky was all a blaze of golden brightness, streaked with long pink and rosy streamers of cloud, from which the evening light, neither glaring nor dim, flooded through the big northwestern windows. The spacious room was a bower of bloom. Great armfuls of flowers hid the capitals of the pilasters, others their bases; garlands—heavy, even corpulent garlands—were looped from pilaster to pilaster; every vase was filled with flowers, the little vases on the brackets, the big ones alternating with the statues in the niches, the huge floor-vases in the corners: the table, the sofas, the floor, all were strewn with smaller blossoms, tiny flowers or fresh petals of roses. The garlands for our heads, which were offered us heaped on a tray, were to the last degree exquisite. I adjusted mine as if in a dream. I was dazed. I knew that the flowers could not have been supplied by our gardens; I could not conjecture whence they came.
Agathemer, bowing and grinning, stood in the inner doorway. My eyes questioned his.
"I have a note here," he said, "which I was enjoined not to hand you until you had lain down to dinner."