| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: I don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown
into something very different from the boy Joel that left
the shop--it must be twenty years ago. I can only know
about you and your affairs what you tell me."
"But my point is," pursued Thorpe, watching her face with
a curiously intent glance, "you never said to yourself:
'I KNOW he's going to succeed. I KNOW he'll be a rich
man before he dies.'"
She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed
fatigued failure to comprehend why he was making so much
of this purposeless point.
The Market-Place |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: passed through the Ecole Polytechnique.
"And I think, madame," he replied, "that I may regard it as an honor
to have got in."
In spite of urgent pressing, he refused politely but firmly to be kept
to dinner, and put an end to the persistency of the ladies by saying
that he was the Hippocrates of his young sister, whose delicate health
required great care.
"Monsieur is perhaps a medical man?" asked one of Emilie's sisters-in-
law with ironical meaning.
"Monsieur has left the Ecole Polytechnique," Mademoiselle de Fontaine
kindly put in; her face had flushed with richer color, as she learned
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