| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: favorably impressed by the cheapness of the marketing; but she
deplores the total absence of muffins and cannel coal, and cannot
resign herself to the Italian method of dusting furniture."
"But they don't, you know--they don't dust it!" Mrs. Lombard
protested, without showing any resentment of her husband's
manner.
"Precisely--they don't dust it. Since we have lived in Siena we
have not once seen the cobwebs removed from the battlements of
the Mangia. Can you conceive of such housekeeping? My wife has
never yet dared to write it home to her aunts at Bonchurch."
Mrs. Lombard accepted in silence this remarkable statement of her
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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 Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: hector and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will lose his hold
on the soberness of things and take himself in earnest for a god.
Talk might be to such an one the very way of moral ruin; the school
where he might learn to be at once intolerable and ridiculous.
This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose. And
for persons of that stamp to learn much by conversation, they must
speak with their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a
superiority that must be proved, but in station. If they cannot
find a friend to bully them for their good, they must find either
an old man, a woman, or some one so far below them in the
artificial order of society, that courtesy may he particularly
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