| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: with her legs carefully hidden in a long white skirt, and looks
so exactly like Mrs. Leo Hunter as Minerva that it is quite
impossible to feel a ray of illusion whilst looking at her. The
ideal of womanly beauty aimed at reminds Englishmen of the
barmaids of the seventies, when the craze for golden hair was at
its worst. Further, whilst Wagner's stage directions are
sometimes disregarded as unintelligently as at Covent Garden, an
intolerably old-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half
historical-pictorial attitude and gesture prevails. The most
striking moments of the drama are conceived as tableaux vivants
with posed models, instead of as passages of action, motion and
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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 Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: impulses contending for mastery, as Billy, now thoroughly awake
and seeing his mother, began to cry, pleading to her with big
blue eyes and out-stretched arms to take him. She started
forward, but Martin stepped between herself and the crib.
"Martin Wade, let me pass. He's mine."
"It isn't going to hurt him to cry. He does it often enough."
"If you had a really cross baby around you'd know how good and
reasonable Billy is," she flamed, torn by the little sobs.
"You get out to that kitchen," he ordered, more openly angry than
Rose had ever seen him. "I've had enough of this talk, do you
hear, and enough of this way of doing. Don't you set foot in here
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