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