s chapter:
Does man ever reform? I argued in the negative, and gave the reasons for
my disbelief much as I have set them forth here. MacShaughnassy, on the
other hand, contended that he did, and instanced the case of himself--a
man who, in his early days, so he asserted, had been a scatterbrained,
impracticable person, entirely without stability.

I maintained that this was merely an example of enormous will-power
enabling a man to overcome and rise superior to the defects of character
with which nature had handicapped him.

"My opinion of you," I said, "is that you are naturally a hopelessly
irresponsible, well-meaning ass. But," I continued quickly, seeing his
hand reaching out towards a complete Shakespeare in one volume that lay
upon the piano, "your mental capabilities are of such extraordinary power
that you can disguise this fact, and make yourself appear a man of sense
and wisdom."

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 u