Today's Stichomancy for Billy Joel

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James:

"They KNOW--it's too monstrous: they know, they know!"

"And what on earth--?" I felt her incredulity as she held me.

"Why, all that WE know--and heaven knows what else besides!" Then, as she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with full coherency even to myself. "Two hours ago, in the garden"-- I could scarce articulate--"Flora SAW!"

Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. "She has told you?" she panted.

"Not a word--that's the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of eight, THAT child!" Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction of it.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart:

Miss Caruthers. Wouldn't you like a hot sherry flip?"

Aunt Selina gasped. Then she sat down heavily on one of the carved teakwood chairs.

"He said he loved you; I heard him," she said weakly. "He--he was going to put his arm around you!"

"Habit!" Jim put in, trying to smile. "You see, Aunt Selina, it's--well, it's a habit I got into some time ago, and I--my arm does it without my thinking about it."

"Habit!" Aunt Selina repeated, her voice thick with passion. Then she turned to me. "Go to your room at once!" she said in her most awful tone. "Go to your room and leave this--this shocking affair

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Yates Pride by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman:

lasted all these years. There has never been another woman I even cared to look at. You are alone, except for that baby, and I am alone. Eudora --"

The man hesitated. His flushed face had paled. Eudora paced silently and waveringly at his side.

"Eudora," the man went on, "you know you always used to run away from me--never gave me a chance to really ask; and I thought you didn't care. But somehow I have wondered--perhaps because you never got married--if you didn't quite mean it, if you didn't quite know your own mind. You'll think I'm a conceited ass, but I'm not a bad sort, Eudora. I would be as good to you as I know

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 Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

Where men but a moment before were sitting, Were gone; that a screen of something around me Shut them out of my sight. But the gilded Signs of a hundred beers and whiskeys Flashed from the walls above, and the mirrors And glasses behind the bar were lighted In some strange way, and into my spirit A thousand shafts of terrible fire Burned like death, and I fell. The story Of what came then, you know.

But tell me,