Today's Stichomancy for Christie Brinkley

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James:

Once more he turned on me his good green eyes. "Oh I shouldn't mind!"

The tone of his words somehow made his ugly face beautiful, and I discovered at this moment how much I really liked him. None the less, at the same time, perversely and rudely, I felt the droll side of our discussion of such alternatives. It made me laugh out and say to him while I laughed: "You'd take her even with those things of Mrs. Meldrum's?"

He remained mournfully grave; I could see that he was surprised at my rude mirth. But he summoned back a vision of the lady at Folkestone and conscientiously replied: "Even with those things of

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Copy-Cat & Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman:

the terrace. "A man and an old maid to bring up that poor child!" they said. But Daniel called Dr. Trumbull to his support. "It is much better for that delicate child to be out of this village, which drains the south hill," Dr. Trumbull declared. "That child needs pure air. It is hot enough in summer all around here, and hot enough at Daniel's, but the air is pure there."

There was no gossip about Daniel and Miss Sarah Dean. Gossip would have seemed about as foolish concerning him and a dry blade of field-grass.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

offered a hundred dollars for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the men who robbed and mur- dered in Oakdale last night. I'll give him a hundred dollars if he'll go away and say nothing about us."

"Look here, son," said Bridge, "every time you open your mouth you put your foot in it. The less you adver- tise the fact that you have a hundred dollars the better off you'll be. I don't know how you come by so much wealth; but in view of several things which occurred last night I should not be crazy, were I you, to have to make a true income tax return. Somehow I have faith in

The Oakdale Affair

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 Summer by Edith Wharton:

undercurrent as mysterious and potent as the influence that makes the forest break into leaf before the ice is off the pools.

The business on which Harney had come was authentic; Charity had seen the letter from a New York publisher commissioning him to make a study of the eighteenth century houses in the less familiar districts of New England. But incomprehensible as the whole affair was to her, and hard as she found it to understand why he paused enchanted before certain neglected and paintless houses, while others, refurbished and "improved" by the