| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: reached Zenith, that neither he nor the city would be the same again, ten days
after his return he could not believe that he had ever been away. Nor was it
at all evident to his acquaintances that there was a new George F. Babbitt,
save that he was more irritable under the incessant chaffing at the Athletic
Club, and once, when Vergil Gunch observed that Seneca Doane ought to be
hanged, Babbitt snorted, "Oh, rats, he's not so bad."
At home he grunted "Eh?" across the newspaper to his commentatory wife, and
was delighted by Tinka's new red tam o'shanter, and announced, "No class to
that corrugated iron garage. Have to build me a nice frame one."
Verona and Kenneth Escott appeared really to be engaged. In his newspaper
Escott had conducted a pure-food crusade against commission-houses. As a
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: she had tried to analyze her impressions, she would have said that
there dwelt the realities of the appearances which figure in our
world; so direct, powerful, and unimpeded were her sensations there,
compared with those called forth in actual life. There dwelt the
things one might have felt, had there been cause; the perfect
happiness of which here we taste the fragment; the beauty seen here in
flying glimpses only. No doubt much of the furniture of this world was
drawn directly from the past, and even from the England of the
Elizabethan age. However the embellishment of this imaginary world
might change, two qualities were constant in it. It was a place where
feelings were liberated from the constraint which the real world puts
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