| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Hellenica by Xenophon: husband, why needest thou to appoint another satrap?--nay but, if in
any matter I please thee not, is it not in thy power to take from me
the government on that day, and to give it to another?" When he had
heard her words, Pharnabazus decided that the woman ought to be
satrap. She, as soon as she was mistress of the territory, never
ceased to render the tribute in due season, even as her husband before
her had done. Moreover, whenever she came to the court of Pharnabazus
she brought him gifts continually, and whenever Pharnabazus went down
to visit her provinces she welcomed him with all fair and courteous
entertainment beyond what his other viceroys were wont to do. The
cities also which had been left to her by her husband, she guarded
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: capable of lifting a kitchen table on her back, if need were, for
although well-proportioned and dressed becomingly, she had the
appearance of unusual strength and determination.
She was some twenty-five years of age, but looked older because she
earned, or intended to earn, her own living, and had already lost the
look of the irresponsible spectator, and taken on that of the private
in the army of workers. Her gestures seemed to have a certain purpose,
the muscles round eyes and lips were set rather firmly, as though the
senses had undergone some discipline, and were held ready for a call
on them. She had contracted two faint lines between her eyebrows, not
from anxiety but from thought, and it was quite evident that all the
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: certain pride and defiance. And the next day he made an
opportunity to praise the lady's intelligence to me concisely,
lest I should miss the point of it all.
After that I heard some gossip--from a friend of the lady's. I
was much too curious to do anything but listen. I had never in
all my life imagined my uncle in an amorous attitude. It would
appear that she called him her "God in the Car"--after the hero
in a novel of Anthony Hope's. It was essential to the
convention of their relations that he should go relentlessly
whenever business called, and it was generally arranged that it
did call. To him women were an incident, it was understood
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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 Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: was a kind of hunger in his look--the two men were for a minute
directly confronted. Marcher knew him at once for one of the
deeply stricken--a perception so sharp that nothing else in the
picture comparatively lived, neither his dress, his age, nor his
presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep ravage
of the features that he showed. He SHOWED them--that was the
point; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that was either
a signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to an opposed
sorrow. He might already have been aware of our friend, might at
some previous hour have noticed in him the smooth habit of the
scene, with which the state of his own senses so scantly consorted,
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