They did not merely want my financial support.

That, I could almost have understood; people take help where they can find it.

What that sentence revealed was something uglier: that they resented the fact that the support came from me.

They needed my money to sustain their lifestyle, and their fragile, brittle pride could not bear to admit that the woman they looked down upon was the one keeping every one of them afloat.

Suddenly it all made a terrible sense.