We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime.

Having little is hard on its own terms, and a great deal of the pain comes from how others behave about it. Shortage turns into shame because people treat it as evidence of a fault rather than of circumstance, and that treatment is what follows you into rooms. Anyone short of money is managing a practical problem and a social verdict at once, and the verdict is the heavier of the two. It was never earned.

If money is tight, try to keep the practical problem separate from the judgement attached to it. And watch how you speak about people with less, since the crime exists only in the telling.