| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: people, and though you might be yourself not exactly one of those,
you could yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a
little how they sometimes felt. It was truly the life of high
pressure that Strether had seemed to feel himself lead while he
sat there, close to Chad, during the long tension of the act. He
was in presence of a fact that occupied his whole mind, that
occupied for the half-hour his senses themselves all together; but
he couldn't without inconvenience show anything--which moreover
might count really as luck. What he might have shown, had he shown
at all, was exactly the kind of emotion--the emotion of
bewilderment--that he had proposed to himself from the first,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: jacket, made a contrast with his brother's clothing, but the color and
material were the same; the two brothers were otherwise dressed alike,
and looked alike.
No one could see them without feeling touched by the way in which
Louis took care of Marie. There was an almost fatherly look in the
older boy's eyes; and Marie, child though he was, seemed to be full of
gratitude to Louis. They were like two buds, scarcely separated from
the stem that bore them, swayed by the same breeze, lying in the same
ray of sunlight; but the one was a brightly colored flower, the other
somewhat bleached and pale. At a glance, a word, an inflection in
their mother's voice, they grew heedful, turned to look at her and
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: you had a real opponent before you.'"
"Oh, baby, maybe I wouldn't like that!" Ted chanted. "I'll tell the world!
Gosh, I'd like to take one fellow I know in school that's always shooting off
his mouth, and catch him alone--"
"Nonsense! The idea! Most useless thing I ever heard of!" Babbitt
fulminated.
"Well, just suppose I was walking with Mama or Rone, and somebody passed a
slighting remark or used improper language. What would I do?"
"Why, you'd probably bust the record for the hundred-yard dash!"
"I WOULD not! I'd stand right up to any mucker that passed a slighting remark
on MY sister and I'd show him--"
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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 Eryxias by Platonic Imitator: And they are of a quality, too, finer than any other land in Hellas.
Moreover, he has all the things which go to make up wealth, slaves and
horses innumerable, gold and silver without end.
I saw that he was inclined to expatiate on the riches of the man; so I
asked him, Well, Erasistratus, and what sort of character does he bear in
Sicily?
ERASISTRATUS: He is esteemed to be, and really is, the wickedest of all
the Sicilians and Italians, and even more wicked than he is rich; indeed,
if you were to ask any Sicilian whom he thought to be the worst and the
richest of mankind, you would never hear any one else named.
I reflected that we were speaking, not of trivial matters, but about wealth
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