Read it through once

“This place is a mere _pied à terre_,” she wrote, “till we can suit ourselves better,” and her one dread was that her father would elect to live in Reading, to which town she had now taken a sudden and violent dislike. “Not that I have any quarrel with the town, which, as Gray said of Cambridge, ‘would be well enough if it were not for the people’; but those people—their gossiping—their mistiness! Oh! you can imagine nothing so bad. They are as rusty as old iron, and as jagged as flints.” By which we may quite properly infer that the affairs and dwindled fortunes of the Mitfords were being openly discussed.