He must have been speaking for some time before the sound pierced through to my ears, for I saw Ruth moving in obedience to his voice before I had grasped what he was saying. Her movement made the same impression upon me as his voice: muffled, slow, and infinitely remote; she crept, rather than she walked, and when she raised her hand she raised it with such torpid and deliberate effort that she seemed to be dragging it upwards with some heavy weight attached. As for her feet, they positively stuck to the ground. Westmacott said something more; he pointed. She turned, still with that slow laborious deliberation, and moved like a shackled ghost from the room. Westmacott and I were left, and we were silent, he perhaps from choice, I certainly from inability to speak. I think now that he was less shattered than Ruth or me, having played a more negative rôle; he had merely stood there to be shot at, while Ruth and I had flung, she direct, I indirect passion into the shooting. We were worn, spent, exhausted, he had his forces still intact. An absurd phrase came into my mind, so childish that I hesitate to write it down: Which would you rather be, the shooter or the shootee? and presently I hit on the rhyme, so that a sing-song began in my head:— “Which would you rather be, The shooter or the shootee?” and still Westmacott stood there holding the revolver, and I stood there holding the pieces of the broken plate, and all the while I seemed to hear the corner-stones of my cherished schemes dropping to earth like pieces of masonry after an explosion. We stood quite motionless. Overhead somebody was moving about. Outside it was nearly dark. Perception was beginning to return to me, bringing in its train a sense of defeat. I had often wondered how the people in a play or in a story continued to live their lives after the climax which parted spectator and actor for ever, I had often followed them in spirit, come down to breakfast with them next morning, so to speak, producing the situation into the region of inevitable anticlimax. Here I was, then, at the old game, an actor myself. I supposed that the play was at an end, and that this was the return to life. That the play should end happily or unhappily, was an accident proper to the play only; all that was certain, all that was inevitable, was that life must be gone on with after the play was over. You couldn’t stop; you were like a man tied on to the back of a traction-engine, willy-nilly you had to go on walking, walking, walking. The dreariness of it! I looked at the pieces of broken plate in my hand, the sum total of all that passion, all that great outburst of pent emotion. I threw back my head, and laughed long, loud, and bitterly.