If you will excuse my speaking frankly about the family"-- John nodded--"they bullied their brother always; what with their superiority of birth, and his being so much younger, and so on.

Their bringing-up made him what he was, I am sure.

He went nowhere; he always fancied people were laughing at him.
His feeling about his--his mother's lowly origin seemed to pervade his whole life.

He exaggerated the importance of birth till it became almost a mania.

If you hadn't known the man, you couldn't have believed a human being--one of the million crawling units on the earth--could be so absurdly inflated with self-importance.