| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: heated to such an extent that it is next to impossible to sit still,
great gusts of hot air coming up under the cushions, the cushions
themselves being very hot, and the wretched traveller still hotter.
But when I reached my home and got out of the train into the purest,
brightest snow-atmosphere, the air so still that the whole world seemed
to be listening, the sky cloudless, the crisp snow sparkling underfoot
and on the trees, and a happy row of three beaming babies awaiting me,
I was consoled for all my torments, only remembering them enough to wonder
why I had gone away at all.
The babies each had a kitten in one hand and an elegant
bouquet of pine needles and grass in the other, and what with
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: predecessor. Was it worse because she had been keeping worse
company? If her secret was, as she had told me, her life - a fact
discernible in her increasing bloom, an air of conscious privilege
that, cleverly corrected by pretty charities, gave distinction to
her appearance - it had yet not a direct influence on her work.
That only made one - everything only made one - yearn the more for
it; only rounded it off with a mystery finer and subtler.
CHAPTER XI.
IT was therefore from her husband I could never remove my eyes: I
beset him in a manner that might have made him uneasy. I went even
so far as to engage him in conversation. Didn't he know, hadn't he
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