| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: Then another little child said: ``My Mama has made me a beautiful
pink dress, and I will wear that to your party.''
Mama? My Mama?
Bessie Bell leaned against the little fluted post of the gallery to
the cabin where she and Sister Helen Vincula lived, and thought a
great deal about that.
And Bessie Bell wondered a great deal what that could mean: Mama?
My Mama?
There were strange new things in this world.
Bessie Bell almost forgot to remember now, because every day was so
full of such strange new things to know.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Damaged Goods by Upton Sinclair: marriage would cause such horrors. But that I do not believe.
You and your teachers--you are specialists, and consequently you
are driven to attribute everything to the disease you make the
subject of your studies. A tragic case, an exceptional case,
holds a kind of fascination for you; you think it can never be
talked about enough."
"I have heard that argument before," said the doctor, with an
effort at patience.
"Let me go on, I beg you," pleaded George. "You have told me
that out of every seven men there is one syphilitic. You have
told me that there are one hundred thousand in Paris, coming and
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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 Enemies of Books by William Blades: Beware of this mistake. It frequently occurs through not noticing
that one small book is purposely placed at each end of the shelf,
beneath the movable shelf-supports, thus not only saving space,
but preventing the injury which a book shelf-high would be sure
to receive from uneven pressure.
After all, the best guide in these, as in many other matters,
is "common sense," a quality which in olden times must have been
much more "common" than in these days, else the phrase would
never have become rooted in our common tongue.
Children, with all their innocence, are often guilty of book-murder. I
must confess to having once taken down "Humphrey's History of Writing,"
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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 Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: as lurid as any one's--not, of course, her aunt's own personal
past, which was apparently just that curate and almost incredibly
jejune, but an ancestral past with all sorts of scandalous things
in it: fire and slaughterings, exogamy, marriage by capture,
corroborees, cannibalism! Ancestresses with perhaps dim
anticipatory likenesses to her aunt, their hair less neatly done,
no doubt, their manners and gestures as yet undisciplined, but
still ancestresses in the direct line, must have danced through a
brief and stirring life in the woady buff. Was there no echo
anywhere in Miss Stanley's pacified brain? Those empty rooms, if
they were empty, were the equivalents of astoundingly decorated
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