t
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. It would have
been interesting to know how they, the Mesuriers, came to be what they
were. In the dark night of their history a family portrait or two, or an
occasional reference in history, would have been an entertaining
illumination--but, such not being forthcoming, they were, documentally,
so much the less indebted to their progenitors. Yet if they had only
been able to claim some ancestor with a wig and a degree for the
humanities, or some beautiful ancestress with a romantic reputation!
One's own present is so much more interesting for developing, or even
repeating, some one else's past. 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 hampe