| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: Passing her desk, once, he picked up a volume of Kipling's poems
and glanced bepuzzled through the pages. "You like reading, Miss
Mason?" he said, laying the book down.
"Oh, yes," was her answer; "very much."
Another time it was a book of Wells', The Wheels of Change.
"What's it all about?" Daylight asked.
"Oh, it's just a novel, a love-story." She stopped, but he still
stood waiting, and she felt it incumbent to go on.
"It's about a little Cockney draper's assistant, who takes a
vacation on his bicycle, and falls in with a young girl very much
above him. Her mother is a popular writer and all that. And the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: the vintage season for the various processes of making wine.
CHAPTER IV
Margaritis was seated in an arm-chair covered with yellow Utrecht
velvet, near the window of the salon, and he did not stir as the two
ladies entered with Gaudissart. His thoughts were running on the casks
of wine. He was a spare man, and his bald head, garnished with a few
spare locks at the back of it, was pear-shaped in conformation. His
sunken eyes, overtopped by heavy black brows and surrounded by
discolored circles, his nose, thin and sharp like the blade of a
knife, the strongly marked jawbone, the hollow cheeks, and the oblong
tendency of all these lines, together with his unnaturally long 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 Adam Bede by George Eliot: little buckled shoes. Mrs. Poyser was provoked at herself, for
she could hardly keep from smiling, as any mortal is inclined to
do at the sight of pretty round things. So she turned without
speaking, and joined the group outside the house door, followed by
Hetty, whose heart was fluttering so at the thought of some one
she expected to see at church that she hardly felt the ground she
trod on.
And now the little procession set off. Mr. Poyser was in his
Sunday suit of drab, with a red-and-green waistcoat and a green
watch-ribbon having a large cornelian seal attached, pendant like
a plumb-line from that promontory where his watch-pocket was
Adam Bede |
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 Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: something pretty to look at right away."
"Oh, sister," said Ann Eliza, in trembling sympathy. She felt
that special indulgence must be conceded to those in Evelina's
state since she had had her own fleeting vision of such mysterious
longings as the words betrayed.
Evelina, meanwhile, had taken the bundle of dried grasses out
of the broken china vase, and was putting the jonquils in their
place with touches that lingered down their smooth stems and blade-
like leaves.
"Ain't they pretty?" she kept repeating as she gathered the
flowers into a starry circle. "Seems as if spring was really here,
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