| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: said one to the other, presently; 'I've not enough for grandmother's.'"
"Ethel took me rather sharply by the arm. 'Did you hear that?' she asked."
"'It can't be she, you know,' said I. 'He would have come back from
Europe.'"
"But we found it out at lunch. It was she, and she had been dead for
fifteen years."
"Ethel and I talked it over in the train going up to town on Monday
morning. We had by that time grown calmer. 'If it is not false
pretences,' said she, 'and you cannot sue him for damages, and if it is
not stealing or something, and you cannot put him in prison, what are you
going to do to him, Richard?'"
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: necessary to breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses
predominate, before the New Protestantism becomes politically
practicable.*
*The necessity for breeding the governing class from a selected
stock has always been recognized by Aristocrats, however
erroneous their methods of selection. We have changed our system
from Aristocracy to Democracy without considering that we were at
the same time changing, as regards our governing class, from
Selection to Promiscuity. Those who have taken a practical part
in modern politics best know how farcical the result is.
The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth
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