| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: giggling, nudging spectators, Flora wasn't ready to tell about
herself. She held her little court in the crowd, upon the grass,
playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease in all
promiscuities. It was an effect of these things that from the very
first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main
business with her would be just to have a go at her head and to
arrange in that view for an early sitting. It would have been as
impossible, I think, to be impertinent to her as it would have been
to throw a stone at a plate-glass window; so any talk that went
forward on the basis of her loveliness was the most natural thing
in the world and immediately became the most general and sociable.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac: dangerous sibyl who had drawn her to her side gave one of those looks
which a man can give--potent over a blinded heart, but simply
ridiculous in the eyes of a woman who is beginning to criticise the
man who has attracted her.
"Do you think you can play the Emperor?" said Madame de Vaudremont,
turning three-quarters of her face to fix an ironical sidelong gaze on
the lawyer.
Martial was too much a man of the world, and had too much wit and
acumen, to risk breaking with a woman who was in favor at Court, and
whom the Emperor wished to see married. He counted, too, on the
jealousy he intended to provoke in her as the surest means of
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