| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: of concord of action in the interests of women was at an end. We
read the debates, and my blood fairly boiled when I found what
taunts and sneers, and epithets she was forced to endure. I
wondered how she could sit still under them.
To make her position worse, the adjoining seat was occupied by an
Irishwoman, who had been elected by the votes of the laborers on
the new Albemarle Extension, in the neighborhood of which she kept
a grocery store. Nelly Kirkpatrick was a great, red-haired giant
of a woman, very illiterate, but with some native wit, and good-
hearted enough, I am told, when she was in her right mind.
She always followed the lead of Mr. Gorham (whose name, you see,
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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 Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: Simply that you felt that you admired me too much.
That is not even a compliment."
"It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession.
Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me.
Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words."
"It was a very disappointing confession."
"Why, what did you expect, Dorian? You didn't see anything else
in the picture, did you? There was nothing else to see?"
"No; there was nothing else to see. Why do you ask?
But you mustn't talk about worship. It is foolish. You and I
are friends, Basil, and we must always remain so."
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Options by O. Henry: royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier
in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors
who come to massacre the said king. And then he has to fight duels
with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian
archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.
"But the great scene is when his rival for the princess' hand, Count
Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel,
armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian
bloodhounds. This scene is what runs the best-seller into the twenty-
ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a check for
the advance royalties.
Options |
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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: widely comprehending Eve; without an enlarged Adam and an enlarged Eve, no
enlarged and beautified generation of mankind on earth; that an arrest in
one form is an arrest in both; and in the upward march of the entire human
family. The truth that, if at the present day, woman, after her long
upward march side by side with man, developing with him through the
countless ages, by means of the endless exercise of the faculties of mind
and body, has now, at last, reached her ultimate limit of growth, and can
progress no farther; that, then, here also, today, the growth of the human
spirit is to be stayed; that here, on the spot of woman's arrest, is the
standard of the race to be finally planted, to move forward no more, for
ever:--that, if the parasite woman on her couch, loaded with gewgaws, the
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