| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: looked after the quaint little figure slowly descending the stairs.
"A brave little woman," murmured the commissioner.
"It is not only the mother in the flesh who knows what a mother's
love is," added Muller.
Next morning Joseph Muller stood in the cell of the prison in G-
confronting Albert Graumann, accused of the murder of John Siders.
The detective had just come from a rather difficult interview with
Commissioner Lange. But the latter, though not a brilliant man, was
at least good-natured. He acknowledged the right of the accused and
his family to ask for outside assistance, and agreed with Muller
that it was better to have some one in the official service brought
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: little men and women who shall succeed to their places and
perplexities.
And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold
back from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away
from battle. To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse
degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a
fall. It is lawful to pray God that we be not led into
temptation; but not lawful to skulk from those that come to
us. The noblest passage in one of the noblest books of this
century, is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in
the partial fall and but imperfect triumph, of the younger
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