| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lemorne Versus Huell by Elizabeth Drew Stoddard: *Give* themselves for life."
I was not allowed to *give* myself--I was *taken*.
"No heel-taps," he whispered, "to the bottom quaff."
"Take me home, will you?"
"Mrs. Bliss is not ready."
"Tell her that I must go."
He went behind her chair and whispered something, and she nodded
to me to go without her.
When her carriage came up, I think he gave the coachman an order
to drive home in a round-about way, for we were a long time reaching
it. I kept my face to the window, and he made no effort to divert
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: been a flurry at home, a regular panic, after which they all went
to bed and took medicine, not to be accounted for on any other
supposition. Morgan had a romantic imagination, led by poetry and
history, and he would have liked those who "bore his name" - as he
used to say to Pemberton with the humour that made his queer
delicacies manly - to carry themselves with an air. But their one
idea was to get in with people who didn't want them and to take
snubs as it they were honourable scars. Why people didn't want
them more he didn't know - that was people's own affair; after all
they weren't superficially repulsive, they were a hundred times
cleverer than most of the dreary grandees, the "poor swells" they
|