Perhaps the chief element was that peculiar ‘poor man’s pride’ which compels many poor people to spend their last savings on some traditional special ceremony, simply in order to do ‘like other people’ and not ‘be looked down upon’. It is very probable too, that Katerina Ivanovna longed on this occasion, at the moment when she seemed to be abandoned by everyone, to show those ‘wretched contemptible lodgers’ that she knew ‘how to do things, how to entertain’ and that she had been brought up ‘in a genteel, she might almost say aristocratic colonel’s family’ and had not been meant for sweeping floors and washing the children’s rags at night.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”.
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