Dublin is a small city , so small that one can walk from the center to the outskirts in twenty minutes. It is a city that is commercial and bureaucratic and not industrial; little business of an absorbing nature is transacted there, and the citizens are leisurely in their ways and disengaged in their minds. The size of the city and the pursuits of the inhabitants give rise to an interest in character --an interest that was present in all the coteries that the Dublin of the turn of the century composed itself into. A "characters" doings and sayings would be repeated from coterie to coterie . . .