| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Foolish Virgin by Thomas Dixon: front and finely dressed women were running up the red
carpet that led down the stoop and under the canopy to
the curb. Did any of the gay dames who smiled and
smirked at that thief's wife ask how he got the money
to buy the house? Not much. Would they have cared if
they had known? They'd have called him a shrewd
lawyer--that's all! Do you reckon his wife worries
about such tricks of trade? Why should mine worry?"
She gripped his hand with desperate pleading.
"Oh, Jim, dear, you can't be a criminal at heart!
I wouldn't have loved you if it had been true. I can't
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Red Seal by Natalie Sumner Lincoln: the transaction this afternoon," answered Kent.
"You did not know" - Ferguson looked at him in dawning comprehension.
"You mean Rochester absconded with the funds?"
"Some one forged my name to checks drawn on the firm's account,"
Kent continued. "I understood they were made payable to cash and
presented by Rochester on the day of Turnbull's death."
Ferguson whistled as a slight vent to his feelings. "So you suspect
Rochester of being a forger?" Kent made no reply, and he added;
after a moment's deliberation, "What bearing has this discovery on
Turnbull's death, aside from Rochester's need of funds to make a
clean disappearance?"
The Red Seal |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moon-Face and Other Stories by Jack London: of his tensed body, and she knew that spirit and flesh were relaxing together.
His resolution was ebbing. He would not speak--she knew it; and she knew,
likewise, with the sureness of faith, that it was because he could not.
She gazed despairingly before her, a numb feeling at her heart, as though hope
and happiness had died. She watched the sun flickering down through the
warm-trunked redwoods. But she watched in a mechanical, absent way. She looked
at the scene as from a long way off, without interest, herself an alien, no
longer an intimate part of the earth and trees and flowers she loved so well.
So far removed did she seem, that she was aware of a curiosity, strangely
impersonal, in what lay around her. Through a near vista she looked at a
buckeye tree in full blossom as though her eyes encountered it for the first
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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 Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: "Where from?" asked the captain, astonished.
"Come here, and let me whisper in your ear--if 30,000 crowns were
walking about at night under the shadow of a pear-tree, would you not
stoop down to pluck them, to prevent them spoiling?"
"Chiquon, I'll kill you like a dog if you are making game of me, or I
will kiss you there where you like it, if you will put me opposite
30,000 crowns, even when it shall be necessary to kill three citizens
at the corner of the Quay."
"You will not even kill one. This is how the matter stands. I have for
a sweetheart in all loyalty, the servant of the Lombard who is in the
city near the house of our good uncle. Now I have just learned on
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
