| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Witch, et. al by Anton Chekhov: where is he to go? He has not had a morsel for these three days."
"Three days!" said Crutch, amazed.
"Here he sits and does not say a word. He has grown feeble. And
why be silent? He ought to prosecute her, they wouldn't flatter
her in the police court."
"Wouldn't flatter whom?" asked Crutch, not hearing.
"What?"
"The woman's all right, she does her best. In their line of
business they can't get on without that . . . without sin, I
mean. . . ."
"From his own house," Yakov went on with irritation. "Save up and
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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 Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: be "the whole town." Gaston de Nueil recognized in them the invariable
stock characters which every observer finds in every one of the many
capitals of the little States which made up the France of an older
day.
First of all comes the family whose claims to nobility are regarded as
incontestable, and of the highest antiquity in the department, though
no one has so much as heard of them a bare fifty leagues away. This
species of royal family on a small scale is distantly, but
unmistakably, connected with the Navarreins and the Grandlieu family,
and related to the Cadignans, and the Blamont-Chauvrys. The head of
the illustrious house is invariably a determined sportsman. He has no
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions
of an audience not practised in the tricks and delusions of oratory.
Wilson sat down victorious. The house submerged him in tides of
approving applause; friends swarmed to him and shook him by the hand
and congratulated him, and Billson was shouted down and not allowed
to say a word. The Chair hammered and hammered with its gavel, and
kept shouting:
"But let us proceed, gentlemen, let us proceed!"
At last there was a measurable degree of quiet, and the hatter said:
"But what is there to proceed with, sir, but to deliver the money?"
Voices. "That's it! That's it! Come forward, Wilson!"
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
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 Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: things that, although he was in the midst of many people, he saw
nobody. He had taken his place unceremoniously beside one of the most
fascinating women in Paris, a young and graceful dancer, with slender
figure, a face as fresh as a child's, all pink and white, and so
fragile, so transparent, that it seemed that a man's glance must pass
through her as the sun's rays pass through flawless glass. They stood
there before me, side by side, so close together, that the stranger
rubbed against the gauze dress, and the wreaths of flowers, and the
hair, slightly crimped, and the floating ends of the sash.
I had brought that young woman to Madame de Lanty's ball. As it was
her first visit to that house, I forgave her her stifled laugh; but I
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