"meagre ambition"

Question

What does this sentence mean? Specifically, what does "meagre" mean here? As per dictionaries, it should mean "inadequate", but the character does display self-denial. The usage of the word "ambition" seems out of place too. Wells's short story The Purple Pileus

And Coombes was such a harmless little man, too, nourished mentally on Self-Help, and with a meagre ambition of self-denial and competition that was to end in a "sufficiency."

Answer 1

An ambition of self-denial and competition is a somewhat positive description. Combining that with meagre makes it align with the general evaluation harmless little man, what Coombes was before his psychedelic experience with the magic mushrooms.
Whether meagre is taken as insufficient or small and weak doesn't change the sense of the passage.