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.
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