"Give what up?"

"Your game of keeping them going. That is your game, isn't it?
Everybody's saying how wonderful Grannie is. They mean she ought to have
been dead years ago.

"They were all old, horribly old and done for, ages ago. I can remember
them. But they know that if they can get a young virgin sacrificed to
them they'll go on. You're the young virgin. You're making them go on."

"If I could--it wouldn't hurt me. Nothing hurts you, Michael, when
you're happy. It's awful to think how they've lived without being happy,
without loving.

"They used to hate me because I'm Vera's daughter. They don't hate me
now."

"You don't hate what you feed on. You love it. They're vampires. They'll
suck your life out of you. I wonder you're not afraid of them.

"I'm afraid of them. I always was afraid of them; when I was a kid and
Mother used to send me with messages to that beastly spooky house they
live in. I used to think it was poor old Grandpapa's ghost I funked. But
I know now it wasn't. It was those four terrible women. They're ghosts.
I thought you were afraid of ghosts."

"I'm much more afraid of you, when you're cruel. Can't you see how awful
it must be for them to be ghosts? Ghosts among living people. Everybody
afraid of them--not wanting them."

"Michael--it would be better to be dead!"

* * * * *

Towards the end of the afternoon Frances's Day changed its appearance
and its character. In the tennis courts Michael's friends played singles
with an incomparable fury, frankly rejecting the partners offered them
and disdaining inferior antagonists; they played, Ellis against Mitchell
and Monier-Owen against Nicholas.

They had arrived late with Vera and Lawrence Stephen.

It had come to that. Anthony and Frances found that they could not go on
for ever refusing the acquaintance of the man who had done so much for
Michael. Stephen's enthusiastic eulogy of Michael's Poems had made an
end of that old animosity a year ago. Practically, they had had to
choose between Bartie and Lawrence Stephen as the turning point of
honour. Michael had made them see that it was possible to overvalue
Bartie; also that it was possible to pay too high a price for a
consecrated moral attitude. In all his life the wretched Bartie had
never done a thing for any of them, whereas he, Michael, owed his rather
extraordinary success absolutely to Lawrence Stephen. If the strike made
his father bankrupt