| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: 'Why, we both are, sir,' said Rowley.
'Yes, both,' said I; 'and you shall dance at the wedding;' and I
flung at his head a bundle of bank notes, and had just followed it
up with a handful of guineas, when the door opened, and Mr. Romaine
appeared upon the threshold.
CHAPTER XVIII - MR. ROMAINE CALLS ME NAMES
FEELING very much of a fool to be thus taken by surprise, I
scrambled to my feet and hastened to make my visitor welcome. He
did not refuse me his hand; but he gave it with a coldness and
distance for which I was quite unprepared, and his countenance, as
he looked on me, was marked in a strong degree with concern and
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Eve and David by Honore de Balzac: the money was paid over, the purchaser undertaking to pay rent for the
last quarter. The next day Eve sent forty thousand francs to the
Receiver-General, and bought two thousand five hundred francs of
rentes in her husband's name. Then she wrote to her father-in-law and
asked him to find a small farm, worth about ten thousand francs, for
her near Marsac. She meant to invest her own fortune in this way.
The tall Cointet's plot was formidably simple. From the very first he
considered that the plan of sizing the pulp in the vat was
impracticable. The real secret of fortune lay in the composition of
the pulp, in the cheap vegetable fibre as a substitute for rags. He
made up his mind, therefore, to lay immense stress on the secondary
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