| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: till he was a living waterspout. But even then..."I dreamed I was hanging
over a terrifically high cliff, shouting to some one below." You would be!
thought Stanley. He could stick no more of it. He stopped splashing.
"Look here, Trout," he said, "I'm in rather a hurry this morning."
"You're WHAT?" Jonathan was so surprised--or pretended to be--that he sank
under the water, then reappeared again blowing.
"All I mean is," said Stanley, "I've no time to--to--to fool about. I want
to get this over. I'm in a hurry. I've work to do this morning--see?"
Jonathan was gone before Stanley had finished. "Pass, friend!" said the
bass voice gently, and he slid away through the water with scarcely a
ripple...But curse the fellow! He'd ruined Stanley's bathe. What an
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: cradle and paddled him when he misbehaved; and yet, as she had not so
much as set eyes on him since he was eleven and had his last serious
illness, the tall, slender, refined, and rather melancholy young
gentleman of twenty came upon her with the shock of a new acquaintance.
He was "Young Hermiston," "the laird himsel' ": he had an air of
distinctive superiority, a cold straight glance of his black eyes, that
abashed the woman's tantrums in the beginning, and therefore the
possibility of any quarrel was excluded. He was new, and therefore
immediately aroused her curiosity; he was reticent, and kept it awake.
And lastly he was dark and she fair, and he was male and she female, the
everlasting fountains of interest.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: calm?--Ah! well, every human passion wrought up to its highest pitch
in the struggle for existence comes to parade itself before me--as I
live in calm. As for your scientific curiosity, a kind of wrestling
bout in which man is never uppermost, I replace it by an insight into
all the springs of action in man and woman. To sum up, the world is
mine without effort of mine, and the world has not the slightest hold
on me. Listen to this,' he went on, 'I will tell you the history of my
morning, and you will divine my pleasures.'
"He got up, pushed the bolt of the door, drew a tapestry curtain
across it with a sharp grating sound of the rings on the rod, then he
sat down again.
Gobseck |
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 Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: opened. The train had stopped again and the car was oppressively
hot. People around were looking at their watches and grumbling over
the delay. The doctor bustled in with a remark about its being his
busy day. The amateur detective and the porter together mounted
guard over lower ten. Outside the heat rose in shimmering waves
from the tracks: the very wood of the car was hot to touch. A
Camberwell Beauty darted through the open door and made its way,
in erratic plunges, great wings waving, down the sunny aisle. All
around lay the peace of harvested fields, the quiet of the country.
CHAPTER VI
THE GIRL IN BLUE
The Man in Lower Ten |
