Today's Stichomancy for John Dillinger

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

to have shown her without precautions, oughtn't indeed to have shown her at all. His precautions should have been those of a forger or a murderer, and the people at home would never have mentioned extradition. This was a wife for foreign service or purely external use; a decent consideration would have spared her the injury of comparisons. Such was the first flush of George Stransom's reaction; but as he sat alone that night - there were particular hours he always passed alone - the harshness dropped from it and left only the pity. HE could spend an evening with Kate Creston, if the man to whom she had given everything couldn't. He had known her twenty years, and she was the only woman for whom

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad:

pity for my ignorance that our deputy-Neptune had retired and gone home on a pension about three weeks after I left the port. So I suppose that my appointment was the last act, outside the daily routine, of his official life.

It is strange how on coming ashore I was struck by the springy step, the lively eyes, the strong vitality of every one I met. It impressed me enormously. And amongst those I met there was Captain Giles, of course. It would have been very extraordinary if I had not met him. A prolonged

The Shadow Line

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare:

And issue forth and bid them battle straight.

YORK. Five men to twenty!--though the odds be great, I doubt not, uncle, of our victory. Many a battle have I won in France Whenas the enemy hath been ten to one; Why should I not now have the like success?

[Alarum. Exeunt.]

SCENE III. Plains near Sandal Castle.

[Alarums. Enter RUTLAND and his TUTOR]

RUTLAND.

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 Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young:

So Bessie Bell just remembered and wondered.

She remembered how somewhere, sometime, there was a window where you could look out and see everything green, little and green, and always changing and moving, away, away--beyond everything little, and green, and moving all the time. But great grown wise folks said: ``No, there is no window in all the world like that.''

And once when some one gave Bessie Bell a little round red apple she caught her breath very quickly and her little heart jumped and then thumped very loudly (that is the way it seemed to her) and she remembered: Little apple trees all just alike, and little apple trees in rows all just alike on top of those and again on top of