Today's Stichomancy for Margaret Thatcher

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac:

escape from nothingness. I consumed more oil than bread; the light I burned during these endless nights cost me more than food. It was a long duel, obstinate, with no sort of consolation. I found no sympathy anywhere. To have friends, must we not form connections with young men, have a few sous so as to be able to go tippling with them, and meet them where students congregate? And I had nothing! And no one in Paris can understand that nothing means NOTHING. When I even thought of revealing my beggary, I had that nervous contraction of the throat which makes a sick man believe that a ball rises up from the oesophagus into the larynx.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War by Frederick A. Talbot:

capacity has been established at Berlin. Unfortunately such big craft demand large docks to accommodate them, and in turn a large structure of this character constitutes an easy mark for hostile attack, as the raiding airmen of the Allies have proved very convincingly.

But the Zeppelin must not be under-rated. Magnificent performances have been recorded by these vessels, such as the round 1,000 miles' trip in 1909, and several other equally brilliant feats since that date. It is quite true that each astounding achievement has been attended by an equally stupendous accident, but that is accepted as a mere incidental detail by the

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James:

the time, none the less, he took his profit where it seemed most to crowd on him, having in his pocket the portable sophistries about the nature of the artist's task. Observation too was a kind of work and experience a kind of success; London dinners were all material and London ladies were fruitful toil. "No one has the faintest conception of what I'm trying for," he said to me, "and not many have read three pages that I've written; but I must dine with them first - they'll find out why when they've time." It was rather rude justice perhaps; but the fatigue had the merit of being a new sort, while the phantasmagoric town was probably after all less of a battlefield than the haunted study. He once told me that

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 Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson:

And so much less sea! And then you could actually see Vailima, which I WOULD like you to, for it's beautiful and my home and tomb that is to be; though it's a wrench not to be planted in Scotland - that I can never deny - if I could only be buried in the hills, under the heather and a table tombstone like the martyrs, where the whaups and plovers are crying! Did you see a man who wrote the STICKIT MINISTER, and dedicated it to me, in words that brought the tears to my eyes every time I looked at them, 'Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying. HIS heart remembers how.' Ah, by God, it does! Singular that I should fulfil the Scots