| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories by Alice Dunbar: hard to be submissive. There was the morning work in the
refectory, the stupid little girls to teach sewing, and the
insatiable lamps that were so greedy for oil. And always the
tender, boyish brown eyes, that looked so sorrowfully at the
fragile, beautiful little sister, haunting, following, pleading.
Perchance, had Sister Josepha been in the world, the eyes would
have been an incident. But in this home of self-repression and
retrospection, it was a life-story. The eyes had gone their way,
doubtless forgetting the little sister they pitied; but the
little sister?
The days glided into weeks, the weeks into months. Thoughts of
The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He
walked back and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges
of the white petals shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and
as he watched them the illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back
frozen.
XII
The motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as
a final effort of escape from his wife's inexpressive acceptance
of his shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep
himself alive to that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to
its consequences. His chief fear was that he should become the
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