In fact, once out of doors and in my litter, with all Uncle's sliding panels open, I felt very much better.

I told my bearers to take me to the Vedian mansion.
There the doorkeeper, indeed, stared, and the footmen nudged each other, but I was received civilly and was shown into the atrium, which I found crowded with the clan clients and with gentlemen like myself.
The atrium of the Vedian mansion had kept, by family tradition, a sort of affectation of old-fashioned plainness.

It was indeed lined with expensive marbles, but it was far soberer in coloring, far simpler in every detail, than most atriums of similar houses.

Instead of striving for an effect of opulent gorgeousness by every device of material, color and decoration, the heads of the Vedian family had expressed, in their atrium, their cult of primitive simplicity.

Compared with others of the houses of senators their atrium appeared bare and bleak.
His guests gazed at me curiously as I advanced to greet our host.
Vedius, the smallest man in the throng, stood blinking at me with his red eyelids, his bald head shining from its top to the thin fringe of reddish hair above his big flaring ears, his small wizened face all screwed up into a knot, his thin lips pursed, his little ferret eyes, close-set against his mean, miserly nose, peering at me under their blinking red lids.
His expression was malign and sneering, his tone sarcastic, but his mere words were not discourteous.
"I am delighted to see you, Andivius," he said, "and very much amazed to see you here.
"I have been told that on the eighth day before the Ides, you entered Vediamnum early of a rainy morning, with an escort so numerous that none could have conjectured that the cavalcade was yours; that, when three or four of the inhabitants of the village accosted you civilly and asked who you were and where you were going, your men, without any reply, fell on them and beat them unmercifully; that, when the population of Vediamnum rushed to the assistance of their fellows, your convoy set upon them and started a pitched battle, mishandling them so frightfully that the street was strewn with stunned and bleeding villagers; that you not only participated in the affray, but fomented it and led it; that the two men who have since died, fell under blows from your own quarter-staff.
"Now, the fact that I see you here leads me to conjecture that, after the occurrences which I have rehearsed, you would not have presented yourself before me and come to salute me, had you not had some version of these events other than that uniformly reported to me.