People were often upset by the way she talked about the city, as if it were a person. As if it were capable of taking offense. More and more frequently she found that people who had never lived there or who had only visited once or twice were very fond of the city, and she had to take care expressing her true feelings about the qualities she thought amounted to mediocrity and a pervasive complacency, but which other people experienced differently, in various ways. A few times she had accidentally spoken her mind before she had been able to cut herself off, and the people to whom she had spoken her mind looked at her as if she was a slightly new person.