Agathemer's face cleared as I spoke.
Tanno rounded on me.
"You tell me, then!" he said. "I guess from their faces that I have advertised my ignorance of what is perfectly well known to everybody else here. Remove my disabilities."
I hesitated and then went in with a rush.
"It does not matter a particle," I said, "how often I lie down to dinner with Agathemer when we are alone. Since I am then the only freeman in the villa there are no witnesses of our dining together. But if I have him to dinner with any guest he becomes thereby a freeman, as you very well know. And if I were free to set him free and chose to free him in that fashion, I should have to advise my friends in advance of my intentions and ask whether they were willing to lend themselves to such a proceeding. One cannot invite a man without previous explanation and then, when he's already in one's house, ask him to lie down to dinner with a slave."
"Slave!" Tanno roared at me, his face red as the back of a boiled lobster. If I had just missed being angry with him, there was no doubt that he was in a tearing fury with me.
"Slave?" he repeated. "Agathemer still a slave? Are you joking or are you serious? Is this true?"
"Entirely and literally true." I affirmed.
Tanno, so red that I should have thought it impossible that he could grow redder, grew redder.
"If your uncle," he roared, "did not free him in his will he was a hog. If you haven't freed him yourself, you're a hog. Free him here and now! Show some decency and some gratitude! Better late than never. Here, Agathemer, get off that boy's stool and lie down between me and Entedius."