| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: Trying to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple and too
inconsequential for gentlemen of our heroic mould; we had rather
set ourselves to something bold, arduous, and conclusive; we had
rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut off a hand or
mortify an appetite. But the task before us, which is to co-endure
with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the
heroism required is that of patience. There is no cutting of the
Gordian knots of life; each must be smilingly unravelled.
To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little
less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to
renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Reef by Edith Wharton: Leath's words gave no hint of her husband's having failed to
justify her choice; but her very reticence betrayed her.
She spoke of him with a kind of impersonal seriousness, as
if he had been a character in a novel or a figure in
history; and what she said sounded as though it had been
learned by heart and slightly dulled by repetition. This
fact immensely increased Darrow's impression that his
meeting with her had annihilated the intervening years.
She, who was always so elusive and inaccessible, had grown
suddenly communicative and kind: had opened the doors of her
past, and tacitly left him to draw his own conclusions. As
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