| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: the ladder left up the clothes chute?"
"The what?" I screeched, and was sorry the next minute. Seeing
her suspicions were verified, Mary Anne had gone white, and stood
with her eyes shifting more wildly than ever.
"There's a ladder up the clothes chute, Miss Innes," she said.
"It's up that tight I can't move it, and I didn't like to ask for
help until I spoke to you."
It was useless to dissemble; Mary Anne knew now as well as I did
that the ladder had no business to be there. I did the best I
could, however. I put her on the defensive at once.
"Then you didn't lock the laundry last night?"
The Circular Staircase |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: that such a possibility had long since become unthinkable to
him. But she insisted. "That day at the Fulmers'--have you
forgotten? When you said it would be sheer madness for us to
marry."
Lansing stood leaning in the embrasure of the window, his eyes
fixed on the mosaic volutes of the floor.
"I was right enough when I said it would be sheer madness for us
to marry," he rejoined at length.
She sprang up trembling. "Well, that's easily settled. Our
compact--"
"Oh, that compact--" he interrupted her with an impatient laugh.
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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 The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these
rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more
forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under
or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and
for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of
the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses,
which were entitled "The Haunted Palace," ran very nearly, if not
accurately, thus:
I.
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
The Fall of the House of Usher |
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 Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: continued Fourchon, pointing to something that floated on the surface.
"We'll have that at any rate; it's a tench, a real tench."
Just then a groom in livery on horseback and leading another horse by
the bridle galloped up the road toward Conches.
"See! there's the chateau people sending after you," said the old man.
"If you want to cross back again I'll give you a hand. I don't mind
about getting wet; it saves washing!"
"How about rheumatism?"
"Rheumatism! don't you see the sun has browned our legs, Mouche and
me, like tobacco-pipes. Here, lean on me, my good gentleman--you're
from Paris; you don't know, though you DO know so much, how to walk on
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