| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker: asylum is full of such cases--men and women, who, naturally selfish
and egotistical, so appraise to themselves their own importance that
every other circumstance in life becomes subservient to it. The
disease supplies in itself the material for self-magnification.
When the decadence attacks a nature naturally proud and selfish and
vain, and lacking both the aptitude and habit of self-restraint, the
development of the disease is more swift, and ranges to farther
limits. It is such persons who become inbued with the idea that
they have the attributes of the Almighty--even that they themselves
are the Almighty.
Mimi had a suspicion--or rather, perhaps, an intuition--of the true
Lair of the White Worm |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: favorite topic, which I need scarcely tell you is genealogy, beginning
with her own.
"If your title to royal blood," she said, "were as plain as mine (through
Admiral Bombo, you know), you would not need any careful research."
She told me a great deal of genealogy, which I spare you; it was not one
family tree, it was a forest of them. It gradually appeared that a
grandmother of my mother's grandfather had been a Fanning, and there were
sundry kinds of Fannings, right ones and wrong ones; the point for me
was, what kind had mine been? No family record showed this. If it was
Fanning of the Bon Homme Richard variety, or Fanning of the Alamance,
then I was no king's descendant
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