| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: limits save by opposing to it something as infinite? Yet, if you
will allow me to hope, not to be yours, but to win your
friendship, I will stay. Let me come, not so very often, if you
require it, to spend a few such hours with you as those stolen
hours of yesterday. The keen delight of that brief happiness to be
cut short at the least over-ardent word from me, will suffice to
enable me to endure the boiling torrent in my veins. Have I
presumed too much upon your generosity by this entreaty to suffer
an intercourse in which all the gain is mine alone? You could find
ways of showing the world, to which you sacrifice so much, that I
am nothing to you; you are so clever and so proud! What have you
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Desert Gold by Zane Grey: through the heart. In an instant, when thoughts resurged like
blinding flashes of lightning through his mind, he was a swaying,
quivering, terror-stricken man. He mumbled something hoarsely and
backed into the shadow. But he need not have feared discovery,
however surely his agitation might have betrayed him. Warren sat
brooding over the campfire, oblivious of his comrade, absorbed in
the past.
Cameron swiftly walked away in the gloom, with the blood thrumming
thick in his ears, whispering over and over:
"Merciful God! Nell was his daughter!"
Chapter III
Desert Gold |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: the eye.
We descended from the church by steep stone stairways
which curved this way and that down narrow alleys
between the packed and dirty tenements of the village.
It was a quarter well stocked with deformed, leering,
unkempt and uncombed idiots, who held out hands or caps
and begged piteously. The people of the quarter were not
all idiots, of course, but all that begged seemed to be,
and were said to be.
I was thinking of going by skiff to the next town,
Necharsteinach; so I ran to the riverside in advance of
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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 Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman: was doom. My throat grew dry as I listened; my tongue stuck to
my mouth I tried to look at Mademoiselle, but I could not.
'It is true that the Captain is gone,' he said stiffly, 'but
others are alive, and about one of them a word with you, by your
leave, Mademoiselle. I have listened to a good deal of talk from
this fine gentleman friend of yours. He has spent the last
twenty-four hours saying "You shall!" and "You shall not!" He
came from you and took a very high tone because we laid a little
whip-lash about that dumb devil of yours. He called us brutes
and beasts, and but for him I am not sure that my friend would
not now be alive. But when he said a few minutes ago that he was
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