| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde: LORD ILLINGWORTH. Far too many.
GERALD. But do you think women shouldn't be good?
LORD ILLINGWORTH. One should never tell them so, they'd all become
good at once. Women are a fascinatingly wilful sex. Every woman
is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.
GERALD. You have never been married, Lord Illingworth, have you?
LORD ILLINGWORTH. Men marry because they are tired; women because
they are curious. Both are disappointed.
GERALD. But don't you think one can be happy when one is married?
LORD ILLINGWORTH. Perfectly happy. But the happiness of a married
man, my dear Gerald, depends on the people he has not married.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: vacancy and that the Beast had stolen away. It sounded too foolish
and too flat; the difference for him in this particular, the
extinction in his life of the element of suspense, was such as in
fact to surprise him. He could scarce have said what the effect
resembled; the abrupt cessation, the positive prohibition, of music
perhaps, more than anything else, in some place all adjusted and
all accustomed to sonority and to attention. If he could at any
rate have conceived lifting the veil from his image at some moment
of the past (what had he done, after all, if not lift it to HER?)
so to do this to-day, to talk to people at large of the Jungle
cleared and confide to them that he now felt it as safe, would have
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