| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: often mingled with obscenity, which occurred at the table where I
was allowed to preside: for a literary friend or two frequently
came home with my master, to dine and pass the night. Having lost
the privileged respect of my sex, my presence, instead of restraining,
perhaps gave the reins to their tongues; still I had the advantage
of hearing discussions, from which, in the common course of life,
women are excluded.
"You may easily imagine, that it was only by degrees that I
could comprehend some of the subjects they investigated, or acquire
from their reasoning what might be termed a moral sense. But my
fondness of reading increasing, and my master occasionally shutting
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: somehow at the right time nothing else ever was. What I meant just
now therefore is that it would all go--go before doing its work--
if they were to fail me."
On which, just here, Miss Gostrey inveterately questioned. "What do
you, in particular, call its work?"
"Well, to see me through."
"But through what?"--she liked to get it all out of him.
"Why through this experience." That was all that would come.
It regularly gave her none the less the last word. "Don't you
remember how in those first days of our meeting it was I who was to
see you through?"
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