| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie: respectable that Tuppence's heart sank. Upon Tommy's request for
Mr. Carter, she showed them into a small study on the ground
floor where she left them. Hardly a minute elapsed, however,
before the door opened, and a tall man with a lean hawklike face
and a tired manner entered the room.
"Mr. Y. A.?" he said, and smiled. His smile was distinctly
attractive. "Do sit down, both of you."
They obeyed. He himself took a chair opposite to Tuppence and
smiled at her encouragingly. There was something in the quality
of his smile that made the girl's usual readiness desert her.
As he did not seem inclined to open the conversation, Tuppence
Secret Adversary |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Camille by Alexandre Dumas: G., whose portrait I had seen and whom Prudence had indicated to
me as the man to whom Marguerite owed her position. It was to him
that she had closed her doors the night before; I imagined that
she had stopped her carriage in order to explain to him why she
had done so, and I hoped that at the same time she had found some
new pretext for not receiving him on the following night.
How I spent the rest of the day I do not know; I walked, smoked,
talked, but what I said, whom I met, I had utterly forgotten by
ten o'clock in the evening.
All I remember is that when I returned home, I spent three hours
over my toilet, and I looked at my watch and my clock a hundred
Camille |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of
his female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair,
but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and
cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have
come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from
New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and
salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in
strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The
bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the
garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and
The Great Gatsby |
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 Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: war cheap, and precluded entirely the need of a commissariat), this
cardinal virtue of cheapness ought to make Squinado an interesting
object in the eyes of the present generation; especially as he was
at that moment a true sanitary martyr, having, like many of his
human fellow-workers, got into a fearful scrape by meddling with
those existing interests, and "vested rights which are but vested
wrongs," which have proved fatal already to more than one Board of
Health. For last night, as he was sitting quietly under a stone in
four fathoms water, he became aware (whether by sight, smell, or
that mysterious sixth sense, to us unknown, which seems to reside
in his delicate feelers) of a palpable nuisance somewhere in the
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