| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: broken-down jobmaster whose wife was in consumption--a vehicle that
made people turn round all the more when her pensioner sat beside
her in a soft white hat and a shawl, one of the dear woman's own.
This was his position and I dare say his costume when on an
afternoon in July she went to return Miss Anvoy's visit. The wheel
of fate had now revolved, and amid silences deep and exhaustive,
compunctions and condonations alike unutterable, Saltram was
reinstated. Was it in pride or in penance that Mrs. Mulville had
begun immediately to drive him about? If he was ashamed of his
ingratitude she might have been ashamed of her forgiveness; but she
was incorrigibly capable of liking him to be conspicuous in the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: never either of us yield our own, or bring over the other.
I insisted on my aversion to lying with my own brother, and
she insisted upon its being impossible to bring him to consent
to my going from him to England; and in this uncertainty we
continued, not differing so as to quarrel, or anything like it,
but so as not to be able to resolve what we should do to make
up that terrible breach that was before us.
At last I resolved on a desperate course, and told my mother
my resolution, viz. that, in short, I would tell him of it myself.
My mother was frighted to the last degree at the very thoughts
of it; but I bid her be easy, told her I would do it gradually
Moll Flanders |
