| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Emma McChesney & Co. by Edna Ferber: have passed for a Bird Center home dressmaker. Yet, given a yard
or two or three of satin and a saucer of pins, Smalley could make
the dumpiest of debutantes look like a fragile flower.
At a critical moment Emma stirred. Handicapped as she was by a
mouthful of nineteen pins and her bow-knot attitude, Smalley
still could voice a protest.
"Don't move!" she commanded, thickly.
"Wait a minute," Emma said, and moved again, more disastrously
than before. "Don't you think it's too--too young?"
She eyed herself in the mirror anxiously, then looked down at
Miss Smalley's nut-cracker face that was peering up at her, its
 Emma McChesney & Co. |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this
ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him.
It bristled there - somewhere near at hand, however unseen still -
as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at
last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a
sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent
with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a
character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in
just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the
drop of this danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole
situation. Yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety he was
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