Today's Stichomancy for Steve McQueen

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:

no word from Nick. She allowed herself yet another day, and that too went by without a letter. She then decided on a step from which her pride had hitherto recoiled; she would call at the bank and ask for Nick's address. She called, embarrassed and hesitating; and was told, after enquiries in the post-office department, that Mr. Nicholas Lansing had given no address since that of the Palazzo Vanderlyn, three months previously. She went back to Versailles that afternoon with the definite intention of writing to Strefford unless the next morning's post brought a letter.

The next morning brought nothing from Nick, but a scribbled

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato:

self-love. But sympathy seems to rest morality on feelings which differ widely even in good men; benevolence and self-love torture one half of our virtuous actions into the likeness of the other. The greatest happiness principle, which includes both, has the advantage over all these in comprehensiveness, but the advantage is purchased at the expense of definiteness.

Again, there are the legal and political principles of morals--freedom, equality, rights of persons; 'Every man to count for one and no man for more than one,' 'Every man equal in the eye of the law and of the legislator.' There is also the other sort of political morality, which if not beginning with 'Might is right,' at any rate seeks to deduce our ideas

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

That had the bitterness of all cold things That were not cruel. "I should have wept," he said, "If I had been the Master. . . ."

Now she could feel His hands above her hair -- the same black hair That once he made a jest of, praising it, While Martha's busy eyes had left their work To flash with laughing envy. Nothing of that Was to be theirs again; and such a thought Was like the flying by of a quick bird Seen through a shadowy doorway in the twilight.

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 New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells:

battlemented Bellinzona, the vast mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind this nearer landscape, and the southward waters with remote coast towns shining dimly, waters that merged at last in a luminous golden haze, made a broad panoramic spectacle. It was as if one surveyed the world,--and it was like the games I used to set out upon my nursery floor. I was exalted by it; I felt larger than men. So kings should feel.

That sense of largness came to me then, and it has come to me since, again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity. Once, I remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind the town and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width