| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: her fluency about things which Ann Eliza half-guessed and quickly
shuddered back from, seemed even more alien and terrible than
the actual tale she told. It was one thing--and heaven knew
it was bad enough!--to learn that one's sister's husband was a
drug-fiend; it was another, and much worse thing, to learn from
that sister's pallid lips what vileness lay behind the word.
Evelina, unconscious of any distress but her own, sat upright,
shivering in Ann Eliza's hold, while she piled up, detail by
detail, her dreary narrative.
"The minute we got out there, and he found the job wasn't as
good as he expected, he changed. At first I thought he was sick--I
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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 Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: Cuvier reconstructed an Anoplotherium. When considering a brief he
would often wake in the night, startled by a gleam of truth suddenly
sparkling in his brain. Struck by the deep injustice, which is the end
of these contests, in which everything is against the honest man,
everything to the advantage of the rogue, he often summed up in favor
of equity against law in such cases as bore on questions of what may
be termed divination. Hence he was regarded by his colleagues as a man
not of a practical mind; his arguments on two lines of deduction made
their deliberations lengthy. When Popinot observed their dislike to
listening to him he gave his opinion briefly; it was said that he was
not a good judge in this class of cases; but as his gift of
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