| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: Japanese collection of pictures--and there is the beer! You do not know
what good beer is until you have been to Munchen. Why, I see fine ladies
every afternoon, but fine ladies, I tell you, drinking glasses so high."
He measured a good washstand pitcher in height, and I smiled.
"If I drink a great deal of Munchen beer I sweat so," said Herr Hoffmann.
"When I am here, in the fields or before my baths, I sweat, but I enjoy it;
but in the town it is not at all the same thing."
Prompted by the thought, he wiped his neck and face with his dinner napkin
and carefully cleaned his ears.
A glass dish of stewed apricots was placed upon the table.
"Ah, fruit!" said Fraulein Stiegelauer, "that is so necessary to health.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: the statuary tribute of having their corpses stuffed.
And it really all comes from the habit of preventing children from
being troublesome. You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing
how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of
Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much
worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan
are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody
appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your
parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor
averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving
them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect
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