| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
If you had married this girl, you would have been wretched.
Of course, you would have treated her kindly. One can always
be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. But she would
have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent
to her. And when a woman finds that out about her husband,
she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart
bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for.
I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have
been abject--which, of course, I would not have allowed--
but I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an
 The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: dependence on it, or suffered from a sympathetic affection:
fashion sulked in its country houses, or came to town incognito,
general entertainments were discountenanced, and informality and
short dinners became the fashion.
But society, amused for a while at playing Cinderella, soon
wearied of the hearthside role, and welcomed the Fairy Godmother
in the shape of any magician powerful enough to turn the shrunken
pumpkin back again into the golden coach. The mere fact of
growing richer at a time when most people's investments are
shrinking, is calculated to attract envious attention; and
according to Wall Street rumours, Welly Bry and Rosedale had
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