“I should think it did do them good!  They feed on you, Ronny.  I can see it by the way they look at you.  You’ll die of them if you don’t give it up.”

“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 he would owe his very means of livelihood to Lawrence Stephen.

Besides, he liked Stephen, and it complicated things most frightfully to go on living in the same house with people who disliked him.