| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: one another in France since the Charter. A woman with principles could
not have fallen into better hands. It is certainly a great thing for a
virtuous woman to have married a man incapable of follies.
Occasionally some fops have been sufficiently impertinent to press the
hand of the marquise while dancing with her. They gained nothing in
return but contemptuous glances; all were made to feel the shock of
that insulting indifference which, like a spring frost, destroys the
germs of flattering hopes. Beaux, wits, and fops, men whose sentiments
are fed by sucking their canes, those of a great name, or a great
fame, those of the highest or the lowest rank in her own world, they
all blanch before her. She has conquered the right to converse as long
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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 Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: and wormwood, out of all this is not to be pretended.
There lingered along in the recollection of the family some
vague memories of her having tried to assert an authority
over Celia's comings and goings at the outset, but they
grouped themselves as only parts of the general disorder of
moving and settling, which a fort-night or so quite righted.
Mrs. Madden still permitted herself a certain license
of hostile comment when her step-daughter was not present,
and listened with gratification to what the women of her
acquaintance ventured upon saying in the same spirit;
but actual interference or remonstrance she never
The Damnation of Theron Ware |
