Today's Stichomancy for George Orwell

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius:

household had taught her to maintain a wise silence. The stern self-control had stolen something of the tenderness from her lips. There were other changes. The sunlight had faded from her hair; the once firm white neck was beginning to lose its resilience. Deep lines furrowed her cheeks from mouth to jaw, and fine wrinkles had slipped into her forehead. There were delicate webs of them about her patient eyes, under which lack of sleep and overwork had left their brown shadows. Since the birth of her baby she had become much heavier and though she was still neat, her dresses were always of dark colors and made up by herself of cheap materials. For, while she bought without consulting Martin,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan:

doctor had given Frederick Prendergast to live; but when one last morning she found an empty bed, and learned that Number 1596 had been discharged in his coffin, she rose from the shock with the sense of a task fully performed and a well-developed desire to see what else there might be in the world.

She announced her intention of travelling for a year or two with a maid, and her family expressed the usual acquiescence. It would help her, they said, to 'shake it off'; but they said that to one another. They were not aware--and it would have spoiled an ideal for them if they had been--that she had shaken it off, quite completely, into Prendergast's grave.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler:

honey, just as if we were married: by the living jingo, I had a month's mind to buss her.

JESSAMY

Well, but how did it end?

JONATHAN

Why, as I was standing talking with her, a parcel of sailor men and boys got round me, the snarl-headed curs fell a-kicking and cursing of me at such a tarnal rate, that I vow I was glad to take to my heels and split home, right off, tail on end, like a stream of chalk.

JESSAMY

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 At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft:

everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting cold to where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished aeons. When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity, he scribbled a message in his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to dispatch it by wireless. This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mosasaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing bones, Archaeopteryx debris, Miocene

At the Mountains of Madness