| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: come from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the
once well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of
the cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days.
Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda
had had what might be called an aesthetically unconventional
upbringing. They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to
breathe in art, and they had been taken also in the other direction, to
the Hague and Berlin, to great Socialist conventions, where the
speakers spoke in every civilized tongue, and no one was abashed.
The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted
by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: "I suppose you have swallowed all those fine words you used about
her the other night. You compared her to a sapphire, or a topaz,
or an amethyst--some precious stone; what was it?"
"I don't remember," said Valentin, "it may have been to a carbuncle!
But she won't make a fool of me now. She has no real charm.
It's an awfully low thing to make a mistake about a person
of that sort."
"I congratulate you," Newman declared, "upon the scales having
fallen from your eyes. It's a great triumph; it ought to make
you feel better."
"Yes, it makes me feel better!" said Valentin, gayly. Then, checking himself,
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