| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: York so handsome and so intelligent. Are you very
much in love with her?"
Newland Archer reddened and laughed. "As much as
a man can be."
She continued to consider him thoughtfully, as if not
to miss any shade of meaning in what he said, "Do you
think, then, there is a limit?"
"To being in love? If there is, I haven't found it!"
She glowed with sympathy. "Ah--it's really and truly
a romance?"
"The most romantic of romances!"
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: because I have a peculiar interest in these contrivances. It
would be more than human not to claim a little in this matter. I
described one in a story in /The Strand Magazine/ in 1903,
and my story could stand in parallel columns beside the first
account of these monsters in action given by Mr. Beach Thomas or
Mr. Philip Gibbs. My friend M. Joseph Reinach has successfully
passed off long extracts from my story as descriptions of the
Tanks upon British officers who had just seen them. The
filiation was indeed quite traceable. They were my grandchildren--
I felt a little like King Lear when first I read about them. Yet
let me state at once that I was certainly not their prime
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart: "Stuff and nonsense," I exclaimed, alarmed. "You're only
seventy. That's what comes of saying in the advertising that you
are eighty--to show what the springs have done for you. It's
enough to make a man die of senility to have ten years tacked to
his age."
"And if," he went on, "if anything happens to me, Minnie, I'm
counting on you to do what you can for the old place. You've
been here a good many years, Minnie."
"Fourteen years I have been ladling out water at this spring," I
said, trying to keep my lips from trembling. "I wouldn't be at
home any place else, unless it would be in an aquarium. But
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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 Daisy Miller by Henry James: he curled his mustaches and rolled his eyes and performed all
the proper functions of a handsome Italian at an evening party.
He sang very prettily half a dozen songs, though Mrs. Walker afterward
declared that she had been quite unable to find out who asked him.
It was apparently not Daisy who had given him his orders.
Daisy sat at a distance from the piano, and though she had publicly,
as it were, professed a high admiration for his singing, talked,
not inaudibly, while it was going on.
"It's a pity these rooms are so small; we can't dance," she said
to Winterbourne, as if she had seen him five minutes before.
"I am not sorry we can't dance," Winterbourne answered;
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