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.