| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: lost a friend.
It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he
was in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman
no more definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that
he loves her, he would not for the world have accentuated his
advantage by any betrayal of indifference. During the first year
of her widowhood their friendship dragged on with halting renewals
of sentiment, becoming more and more a banquet of empty dishes
from which the covers were never removed; then Glennard went to
New York to live and exchanged the faded pleasures of intercourse
for the comparative novelty of correspondence. Her letters, oddly
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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 Awakening & Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin: naturally to the situation which confronted him.
"Please come down," he insisted, holding the ladder and
looking up at her.
"No," she answered; "Ellen is afraid to mount the ladder. Joe
is working over at the `pigeon house'--that's the name Ellen gives
it, because it's so small and looks like a pigeon house--and some
one has to do this."
Arobin pulled off his coat, and expressed himself ready and
willing to tempt fate in her place. Ellen brought him one of her
dust-caps, and went into contortions of mirth, which she found
it impossible to control, when she saw him put it on before
Awakening & Selected Short Stories |
