| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: struck athwart them, like a chaplet of pearls.
"That woman is mad!" cried the marquis.
A hoarse cry, uttered by Genevieve, seemed uttered as a warning to the
unknown woman, who turned suddenly, throwing back her hair from either
side of her face. At this instant the colonel and Monsieur d'Albon
could distinctly see her features; she, herself, perceiving the two
friends, sprang to the iron railing with the lightness and rapidity of
a deer.
"Adieu!" she said, in a soft, harmonious voice, the melody of which
did not convey the slightest feeling or the slightest thought.
Monsieur d'Albon admired the long lashes of her eyelids, the blackness
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart: smiled at me in her old way over the top of the glass. Then she
put down the glass and came over to me. "Minnie, Minnie," she
said, "if you only knew how I've wanted to get away from the
newspapers and the gossips and come to this smelly little spring-
house and talk things over with a red-haired, sharp-tongued,
mean-dispositioned spring-house girl--!"
And with that I began to blubber, and she came into my arms like
a baby.
"You're all I've got," I declared, over and over, "and you're
going to live in a country where they harness women with dogs,
and you'll never hear an English word from morning to night."
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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 Summer by Edith Wharton: Associations...historic, literary (here a filial sigh
for Honorius) and ecclesiastical...he knew about the
old pewter communion service imported from England in
1769, she supposed? And it was so important, in a
wealthy materialistic age, to set the example of
reverting to the old ideals, the family and the
homestead, and so on. This peroration usually carried
her half-way back across the hall, leaving the girls to
return to their interrupted activities.
The day on which Charity Royall was weaving hemlock
garlands for the procession was the last before the
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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 Master of the World by Jules Verne: American State of North Carolina. There, deep amid the Blueridge
Mountains rises the crest called the Great Eyrie Its huge rounded
form is distinctly seen from the little town of Morganton on the
Catawba River, and still more clearly as one approaches the mountains
by way of the village of Pleasant Garden.
Why the name of Great Eyrie was originally given this mountain by the
people of the surrounding region, I am not quite Sure It rises rocky
and grim and inaccessible, and under certain atmospheric conditions
has a peculiarly blue and distant effect. But the idea one would
naturally get from the name is of a refuge for birds of prey, eagles
condors, vultures; the home of vast numbers of the feathered tribes,
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