| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: squares on the walls. They had taken the two little beds, and the
wardrobe had been emptied of Virginia's belongings! Felicite went
upstairs, overcome with grief.
The following day a sign was posted on the door; the chemist screamed
in her ear that the house was for sale.
For a moment she tottered, and had to sit down.
What hurt her most was to give up her room,--so nice for poor Loulou!
She looked at him in despair and implored the Holy Ghost, and it was
this way that she contracted the idolatrous habit of saying her
prayers kneeling in front of the bird. Sometimes the sun fell through
the window on his glass eye, and lighted a spark in it which sent
A Simple Soul |
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 Moon-Face and Other Stories by Jack London: twentieth-century, and the thing in essence, as her uncle had said, was
mediaeval. Yet she could not shake off the instinctive fear that arose in
her--man's inheritance from the wild and howling ages when his hairy, apelike
prototype was afraid of the dark and personified the elements into things of
fear.
But as the mysterious influence seized her hand and sent it meriting across
the paper, all the unusual passed out of the situation and she was unaware of
more than a feeble curiosity. For she was intent on another visioning--this
time of her mother, who was also unremembered in the flesh. Not sharp and
vivid like that of her father, but dim and nebulous was the picture she shaped
of her mother--a saint's head in an aureole of sweetness and goodness and
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