| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: for my Patience," she said. She got up, put the neat cuffs she
had made into her work-basket, and went to the bureau for the
little cards in the morocco case. Ann Veronica jumped up to get
her the card-table. "I haven't seen the new Patience, dear," she
said. "May I sit beside you?"
"It's a very difficult one," said her aunt. "Perhaps you will
help me shuffle?"
Ann Veronica did, and also assisted nimbly with the arrangements
of the rows of eight with which the struggle began. Then she sat
watching the play, sometimes offering a helpful suggestion,
sometimes letting her attention wander to the smoothly shining
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: and, among others, to an Annual styled The Keepsake, the first
volume of which appeared in 1828, and attracted much notice,
chiefly in consequence of the very uncommon splendour of its
illustrative accompaniments. The expenditure which the spirited
proprietors lavished on this magnificent volume is understood to
have been not less than from ten to twelve thousand pounds
sterling!
Various gentlemen of such literary reputation that any one might
think it an honour to be associated with them had been announced
as contributors to this Annual, before application was made to me
to assist in it; and I accordingly placed with much pleasure at
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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 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: to do his work, paying her a little more than half what he had been
paying before.
When she first came to Packingtown, Marija would have scorned such
work as this. She was in another canning factory, and her work
was to trim the meat of those diseased cattle that Jurgis had been
told about not long before. She was shut up in one of the rooms
where the people seldom saw the daylight; beneath her were the
chilling rooms, where the meat was frozen, and above her were
the cooking rooms; and so she stood on an ice-cold floor, while her
head was often so hot that she could scarcely breathe. Trimming beef
off the bones by the hundred-weight, while standing up from early
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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 Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: confine itself. It hadn't indeed so felt its responsibility as when
on this occasion he suddenly measured the suggestive effect of a
lady whose supreme stillness, in the shade of one of the chapels,
he had two or three times noticed as he made, and made once more,
his slow circuit. She wasn't prostrate--not in any degree bowed,
but she was strangely fixed, and her prolonged immobility showed
her, while he passed and paused, as wholly given up to the need,
whatever it was, that had brought her there. She only sat and gazed
before her, as he himself often sat; but she had placed herself, as
he never did, within the focus of the shrine, and she had lost
herself, he could easily see, as he would only have liked to do.
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