Today's Stichomancy for Cary Grant

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Cromwell by William Shakespeare:

Without the shedding of one drop of blood, Into their hands safe to deliver you, And therefore craves none but himself may enter And a poor swain that attends on him.

[Exit servant.]

BEDFORD. A Neopolitan? bid him come in. Were he as cunning in his Eloquence As Cicero, the famous man of Rome, His words would be as chaff against the wind. Sweet tongued Ulysses that made Ajax mad,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells:

the ill-imagined efforts of artists or the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go upon, scarcely realise that living quality.

I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and there his knowledge ended. He pre- sented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings had a con- siderable vogue, and I mention them here simply to warn

War of the Worlds

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather:

nature sometimes hid astonishing secrets. But in spite of this suggestion of hardness he felt that the unerring taste that Treffinger had always shown in larger matters had not deserted him when he came to the choosing of a wife, and he admitted that he could not himself have selected a woman who looked more as Treffinger's wife should look.

While he was explaining the purpose of his frequent visits to the studio she heard him with courteous interest. "I have read, I think, everything that has been published on Sir Hugh Treffinger's work, and it seems to me that there is much left to be said," he concluded.

The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

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 The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac:

However, I have made a hundred 'Globes,' and I must say, considering the thick-headedness of these clodhoppers, it is a miracle. But to do it I had to make them such a lot of promises that I am sure I don't know how the globites, globists, globules, or whatever they call themselves, will ever get out of them. But they always tell me they can make the world a great deal better than it is, so I go ahead and prophesy to the value of ten francs for each subscription. There was one farmer who thought the paper was agricultural because of its name. I Globed HIM. Bah! he gave in at once; he had a projecting forehead; all men with projecting foreheads are ideologists.