Brown agreed with me that in MacShaughnassy’s case traces of the former disposition were clearly apparent, but pleaded that the illustration was an unfortunate one, and that it ought not to have weight in the discussion.

“Seriously speaking,” said he, “don’t you think that there are some experiences great enough to break up and re-form a man’s nature?”

“To break up,” I replied, “yes; but to re-form, no.  Passing through a great experience may shatter a man, or it may strengthen a man, just as passing through a furnace may melt or purify metal, but no furnace ever lit upon this earth can change a bar of gold into a bar of lead, or a bar of lead into one of gold.”

I asked Jephson what he thought.  He did not consider the bar of gold simile a good one.  He held that a man’s character was not an immutable element.  He likened it to a drug—­poison or elixir—­compounded by each man for himself from the pharmacopoeia of all things known to life and time, and saw no impossibility, though some improbability, in the glass being flung aside and a fresh draught prepared with pain and labour.

“Well,” I said, “let us put the case practically; did you ever know a man’s character to change?”

“Yes,” he answered, “I did know a man whose character seemed to me to be completely changed by an experience that happened to him.  It may, as you say, only have been that he was shattered, or that the lesson may have taught him to keep his natural disposition ever under control.  The result, in any case, was striking.”

We asked him to give us the history of the case, and he did so.

“He was a friend of some cousins of mine,” Jephson began, “people I used to see a good deal of in my undergraduate days.  When I met him first he was a young fellow of twenty-six, strong mentally and physically, and of a stern and stubborn nature that those who liked him called masterful, and that those who disliked him—­a more numerous body—­termed tyrannical.  When I saw him three years later, he was an old man of twenty-nine, gentle and yielding beyond the border-line of weakness, mistrustful of himself and considerate of others to a degree that was often unwise.  Formerly, his anger had been a thing very easily and frequently aroused.  Since the change of which I speak, I have never known the shade of anger to cross his face but once.  In the course of a walk, one day, we came upon a young rough terrifying a small child by pretending to set a dog at her.  He seized the boy with a grip that almost choked him, and administered to him a punishment that seemed to me altogether out of proportion to the crime, brutal though it was.

“I remonstrated with him when he rejoined me.

“‘Yes,’ he replied apologetically; ’I suppose I’m a hard judge of some follies.’  And, knowing what his haunted eyes were looking at, I said no more.