The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: wandered away into consideration of the blind forces which move the
world, in which comely young persons like my daughter Cecily had
such a place; I speculated vaguely upon the value of the subtler
gifts of sympathy and insight which seemed indeed, at that
enveloping moment, to be mere flowers strewn upon the tide of deeper
emotions. The garden sent me a fragrance of roses; the moon sailed
higher and picked out the little kiosks set along the wall. It was
a charming, charming thing to wait, there at the portal of the
silvered, scented garden, for an idyll to come forth.
When they reappeared, Dacres and my daughter, they came with casual
steps and cheerful voices. They might have been a couple of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: (3)
The second letter was from Lady Sunderbund, and it was an
altogether more remarkable document. Lady Sunderbund wrote on a
notepaper that was evidently the result of a perverse research,
but she wrote a letter far more coherent than her speech, and
without that curious falling away of the r's that flavoured even
her gravest observations with an unjust faint aroma of absurdity.
She wrote with a thin pen in a rounded boyish handwriting. She
italicized with slashes of the pen.
He held this letter in both hands between his knees, and
considered it now with an expression that brought his eyebrows
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