| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: each other the best turn they could behave like sworn enemies
ever after?" If in offering Nick his freedom she had indeed
done him such a service as that, perhaps he no longer hated her,
would no longer be unwilling to see her .... At any rate, why
should she not write to him on that assumption, write in a
spirit of simple friendliness, suggesting that they should meet
and "settle things"? The business-like word "settle" (how she
hated it) would prove to him that she had no secret designs upon
his liberty; and besides he was too unprejudiced, too modern,
too free from what Strefford called humbug, not to understand
and accept such a suggestion. After all, perhaps Strefford was
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: He challenged himself, denounced himself, asked himself if he were
in love with her that he should care so much what adventures she
had had. He had never for a moment allowed he was in love with
her; therefore nothing could have surprised him more than to
discover he was jealous. What but jealousy could give a man that
sore contentious wish for the detail of what would make him suffer?
Well enough he knew indeed that he should never have it from the
only person who to-day could give it to him. She let him press her
with his sombre eyes, only smiling at him with an exquisite mercy
and breathing equally little the word that would expose her secret
and the word that would appear to deny his literal right to
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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 Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: this beginning I was in search as we drove up among the live-oaks of
Udolpho to the little club-house, or hunting lodge, where a negro and his
wife received us, and took the baskets and set about preparing supper. My
beginning sat so heavily upon my attention that I took scant notice of
Udolpho as we walked about its adjacent grounds in the twilight before
supper, and John Mayrant pointed out to me its fine old trees, its placid
stream, and bade me admire the snug character of the hunting lodge,
buried away for bachelors' delights deep in the heart of the pleasant
forest. I heard him indulging in memories and anecdotes of date sittings
after long hunts; but I was myself always on a hunt for my beginning, and
none of his words clearly reached my intelligence until I was aware of
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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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: the search after pleasure, and for whom even the chase, which was for his
remote ancestor an invigorating and manly toil essential for the meat and
life of his people, becomes a luxurious and farcical amusement;--this male,
whether found in the later Roman Empire, the Turkish harem of today, or in
our Northern civilisations, is possible only because generations of
parasitic women have preceded him. More repulsive than the parasite female
herself, because a yet further product of decay, it is yet only the scent
of his mother's boudoir that we smell in his hair. He is like to the bald
patches and rotten wool on the back of a scabby sheep; which indeed
indicate that, deep beneath the surface, a parasite insect is eating its
way into the flesh, but which are not so much the cause of disease, as its
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