And yet how much better it was to be as they were, than as most scions of aristocratic lineage, whose present was so often nothing and their past everything.

How humiliating to be so pathetically inadequate an outcome of such long and elaborate preparation,--the mouse of a genealogical mountain! Yes, it was immeasurably more satisfactory to one's self-respect to be Something out of Nothing, than Nothing out of Everything.

Here so little had made so much; here so much had made--hardly even a lord.

It was better for your circumstances to be inadequate for you, than you to be inadequate for your circumstances.
Henry had amused himself one day in making a list of all their "ancestors" to whom any sort of worldly or romantic distinction could attach, and it ran somewhat as follows:-- (1) A great-grandmother on the father's side, fabled to live in some sort of a farm-house chateau in Guernsey, who once a year, up till two years ago, when she died, had sent them a hamper of apples from Channel Island orchards.

Said "chateau" believed by his children to descend to James Mesurier, but the latter indifferent to the matter, and relatives on the spot probably able to look after it.
(2) A great-grandfather on the mother's side given to travel, a "rolling-stone," fond of books and talk, and rich in humanity.