| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: outside of her painting, which obviously is execrable."
"But she is not beautiful. I don't even think her very pretty."
"She is quite pretty enough for her purposes, and it is a face and figure on
which everything tells. If she were prettier she would be less intelligent,
and her intelligence is half of her charm."
"In what way," asked Newman, who was much amused at his
companion's immediate philosophization of Mademoiselle Nioche,
"does her intelligence strike you as so remarkable?"
"She has taken the measure of life, and she has determined
to BE something--to succeed at any cost. Her painting,
of course, is a mere trick to gain time. She is waiting for
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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 The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: saw her distinctly, felt her close to him in a contact as painful
as the pressure on a bruise.
The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him
feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an
unknown country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own
souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have
cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest
us we know but the boundaries that march with ours. Of the points
in his wife's character not in direct contact with his own,
Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of
her remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way,
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