labyrinth

Mrs. Churchill liked the interminable labyrinths of the Cyrus and the Cassandra, because she had liked them in the days of her girlhood. Youth identifies itself with the romance; it is the heroic knight, or the lovely lady, of which it reads; it lives amid those fine creations; its sweetest hours are given to dreams which soon "Fade into the light of common day."

Whitney is absorbed especially by Dublin's unglamorous interstitial zones: the new housing estates and labyrinths of roads, watercourses and railways where the city peters into its commuter belt.