| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: not, and will speak of him quite at her ease. The Duchess felt
that she was under the lion's paws; she quaked, but she did not
hate him.
The man and woman thus singularly placed with regard to each
other met three times in society during the course of that week.
Each time, in reply to coquettish questioning glances, the
Duchess received a respectful bow, and smiles tinged with such
savage irony, that all her apprehensions over the card in the
morning were revived at night. Our lives are simply such as our
feelings shape them for us; and the feelings of these two had
hollowed out a great gulf between them
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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 The American by Henry James: (even when they were well pleased) for whom he produced it;
a master of all the distinctively social virtues and a votary
of all agreeable sensations; a devotee of something mysterious
and sacred to which he occasionally alluded in terms more ecstatic
even than those in which he spoke of the last pretty woman,
and which was simply the beautiful though somewhat superannuated
image of HONOR; he was irresistibly entertaining and enlivening,
and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable of
doing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it,
as he was unlikely, in musing upon the possible mixtures
of our human ingredients, mentally to have foreshadowed it.
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