| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: that insulting indifference which, like a spring frost, destroys the
germs of flattering hopes. Beaux, wits, and fops, men whose sentiments
are fed by sucking their canes, those of a great name, or a great
fame, those of the highest or the lowest rank in her own world, they
all blanch before her. She has conquered the right to converse as long
and as often as she chooses with the men who seem to her agreeable,
without being entered on the tablets of gossip. Certain coquettish
women are capable of following a plan of this kind for seven years in
order to gratify their fancies later; but to suppose any such
reservations in the Marquise de Listomere would be to calumniate her.
I have had the happiness of knowing this phoenix. She talks well; I
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Wyoming by William MacLeod Raine: stiff-legged gait of the cowboy. Sometimes a girl was hanging on
his arm, and again he was "whooping it up with the boys"; but in
either case the range-rider's savings were burning a hole through
his pockets with extreme rapidity.
Jim McWilliams and the sheepman Bannister had that day sealed a
friendship that was to be as enduring as life. The owner of the
sheep ranch was already under heavy obligation to the foreman of
the Lazy D, but debt alone is not enough on which to found soul
brotherhood. There must be qualities of kinship in the primeval
elements of character. Both men had suspected that this kinship
existed, but to-day they had proved it in the way that one had
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