in the sense that he had appealed to reason, and thus admitted the jurisdiction of reason in matters which he had formerly proclaimed as outside the province of that sort of reasoning that governs other intellectual questions.  In the result, he was left under the influence of a persuasion, not under the dominion of a command; and the former failed to withstand an assault that the latter might well have enabled him to repulse.  He found himself able to forget what he believed, though not to disbelieve it; his convictions could be postponed, though not expelled; and in representing his mind as the present battle-ground of equal and opposite forces, he had rather expressed what a preacher would reveal as the inner truth of his struggle than what he was himself conscious of as going on within him.  It is likely enough that his previous experience had made him describe his own condition rather in the rhetoric of the pulpit than in the duller language of a psychological narrative.  He had certainly given Morewood one false impression, or rather, perhaps Morewood had drawn one false though natural inference for himself.  He thought of Stafford, and his letter passed on the same view to Eugene, as of a man suffering tortures that passed enduring.  Perhaps at the moment of their interview such was the case:  the dramatic picture Stafford had drawn had for the moment terrified afresh the man who drew it.  His normal state of mind, however, at this time was not unhappy.  He was wretched now and then by effort; he was tortured by the sense of sin when he remembered to be.  But for the most part he was too completely conquered by his passion to do other than rejoice in it.  Possessed wholly by it, and full of an undoubting confidence that Claudia returned his love, or needed only to realize it fully to return it fully, he had silenced all opposition, and went forth to his wooing with an exultation and a triumph that no transitory self-judgments could greatly diminish.  Life lay before him, long and full and rich and sweet.  Let trouble be what it would, and right be what it might, life and love were in his own hands.  The picture of a man giving up all he thought worth having, driven in misery by a force he could not resist to seek a remedy that he despaired of gaining—­a remedy which, even if gained, would bring him nothing but fresh pain—­this picture, over which Eugene was mourning in honest and perplexed friendship, never took form as a true presentment of himself to the man it was supposed to embody.  If Eugene had known this, he would probably have felt less sympathy and more rivalry, and would have assented to Ayre’s view of the situation rather than doubtingly maintained his own.  A man may sometimes change himself more easily than he can persuade his friends to recognize the change.