| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: are peculiar.
"Of course there is always a possibility that the thief might have
entered one room while Siders was in the other; that the latter
might have surprised the robber in his search for money or valuables,
and that there might have been a hand-to-hand struggle before the
intruder could pull out his revolver. Oh, if I could only have seen
the body! This is working under terrific difficulties. The marks
of a hand-to-hand struggle would have been very plain on the clothes
and on the person of the murdered man. But this letter? I do not
understand this letter at all. It is the dead man's handwriting,
that we know, but why did not the friend to whom it was addressed
|
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: would have taken this chance of an explanation, whatever risks
attached to it; but to one of Mary's firm and resolute temperament
there was degradation in the idea of self-abandonment; let the waves
of emotion rise ever so high, she could not shut her eyes to what she
conceived to be the truth. Her silence puzzled Ralph. He searched his
memory for words or deeds that might have made her think badly of him.
In his present mood instances came but too quickly, and on top of them
this culminating proof of his baseness--that he had asked her to marry
him when his reasons for such a proposal were selfish and
half-hearted.
"You needn't answer," he said grimly. "There are reasons enough, I
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: life that were strange and dim to her, just by "Europe" in short,
but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that pious
visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.
She had come with him one day to see how his "apartment-house" was
rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and
while they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but
lively discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the
building firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself
quite "standing up" to this personage over a failure on the
latter's part to observe some detail of one of their noted
conditions, and had so lucidly argued his case that, besides ever
|
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 Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: hesitating a moment, to resume on a note of dull pain, "Partly
because it does not seem greatly to matter whom I marry, I gave
him my consent. That consent, for the reasons I have given you,
madame, I desire now definitely to withdraw."
Madame fell into agitation of the wildest. "Aline, I should never
forgive you! Your uncle Quintin would be in despair. You do not
know what you are saying, what a wonderful thing you are refusing.
Have you no sense of your position, of the station into which you
were born?"
"If I had not, madame, I should have made an end long since. If I
have tolerated this suit for a single moment, it is because I
|
