| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: After dinner that evening, Felix brought the conversation round to the
masked balls of the Opera, remarking that Marie had never been to one,
and proposing that she should accompany him the following evening.
"I'll find you some one to 'intriguer,'" he said.
"Ah! I wish you would," she replied.
"To do the thing well, a woman ought to fasten upon some good prey, a
celebrity, a man of enough wit to give and take. There's Nathan; will
you have him? I know, through a friend of Florine, certain secrets of
his which would drive him crazy."
"Florine?" said the countess. "Do you mean the actress?"
Marie had already heard that name from the lips of the watchman
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: Her look, passing beyond Mary, beyond the verge of the room and out
beyond any words that came her way, wildly and passionately, convinced
Mary that she, at any rate, could not follow such a glance to its end.
She was baffled; she tried to think herself back again into the height
of her love for Ralph. Pressing her fingers upon her eyelids, she
murmured:
"You forget that I loved him too. I thought I knew him. I DID know
him."
And yet, what had she known? She could not remember it any more. She
pressed her eyeballs until they struck stars and suns into her
darkness. She convinced herself that she was stirring among ashes. She
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