| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Vendetta by Honore de Balzac: "Oh, mother!" cried Ginevra, deeply moved.
She felt the impulse to rush home, to breathe the blessed air of her
father's house, to fling herself at his feet, to see her mother. She
was springing forward to accomplish this wish, when Luigi entered. At
the mere sight of him her filial emotion vanished; her tears were
stopped, and she no longer had the strength to abandon that loving and
unfortunate youth. To be the sole hope of a noble being, to love him
and then abandon him!--that sacrifice is the treachery of which young
hearts are incapable. Ginevra had the generosity to bury her own grief
and suffering silently in her soul.
The marriage day arrived. Ginevra had no friend with her. While she
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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 Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: he began to hate the dull benevolence of the average face. Once
or twice, obscurely, allusively, he made a beginning--once
sitting down at a man's side in a basement chop-house, another
day approaching a lounger on an east-side wharf. But in both
cases the premonition of failure checked him on the brink of
avowal. His dread of being taken for a man in the clutch of a
fixed idea gave him an unnatural keenness in reading the
expression of his interlocutors, and he had provided himself in
advance with a series of verbal alternatives, trap-doors of
evasion from the first dart of ridicule or suspicion.
He passed the greater part of the day in the streets, coming home
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