| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: offering him a cake; it seemed to me symbolic of my final separation
from the Fyne household. And I remembered against him how on a
certain day he had abandoned poor Flora de Barral--who was morbidly
sensitive.
I sat down in the porch and, maybe inspired by secret antagonism to
the Fynes, I said to myself deliberately that Captain Anthony must
be a fine fellow. Yet on the facts as I knew them he might have
been a dangerous trifler or a downright scoundrel. He had made a
miserable, hopeless girl follow him clandestinely to London. It is
true that the girl had written since, only Mrs. Fyne had been
remarkably vague as to the contents. They were unsatisfactory.
Chance |
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 Virginian by Owen Wister: and come down through the pool, and so swim to the other side.
There it came out on a small stretch of sand, turned its gray
head and its pointed black nose this way and that, never seeing
them, and then rolled upon its back in the warm dry sand. After a
minute of rolling, it got on its feet again, shook its fur, and
trotted away.
Then the bridegroom husband opened his shy heart deep down.
"I am like that fellow," he said dreamily. "I have often done the
same." And stretching slowly his arms and legs, he lay full
length upon his back, letting his head rest upon her. "If I could
talk his animal language, I could talk to him," he pursued. "And
The Virginian |
