To be first-rate
in your instincts, in all your fibres, and third-rate in your
opportunities,--that was a bitter indignity of circumstance.
This sub-conscious sense of aristocracy--it must be observed, lest it
should have been insufficiently implied--was almost humorously
dissociated in the minds of the young Mesuriers from any recorded family
distinctions. In so far as it was conscious, it was defiantly
independent of genealogy. Had the Mesuriers possessed a coat-of-arms,
James Mesurier would probably have kept it locked up as a frivolity to
be ashamed of, for it was a part of his Puritanism that such earthly
distinctions were foolishness with God; but, as a matter of fact,
between Adam and the immediate great-grandparents of the young
Mesuriers, there was a void which the Herald's office would have found a
difficulty in filling. This it never occurred to them to mind in
the least.
It was one of Henry's deep-sunken maxims that "a distinguished product
implied a distinguished process," and that, at all events, the
genealogical process was only illustratively important.
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