| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Emma McChesney & Co. by Edna Ferber: greeted her smilingly and waved her toward the door opposite.
Miss Sharp, the erstwhile bristling, was strangely smooth and
sleek. She glanced ever so softly, sighed ever so flutteringly.
"Working side by side with him, seeing him day after day, how
have you been able to resist him?"
Emma McChesney was only human, after all.
"By remembering that this is a business house, not a matrimonial
parlor."
The dart found no lodging place in Miss Sharp's sleek armor. She
seemed scarcely to have heard.
"My dear," she whispered, "his eyes! And his manner! You
Emma McChesney & Co. |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: for twelve revolving terms. Different occupations and varying
interests had interrupted the friendship, and it was six years
since Villiers had seen Herbert; and now he looked upon this
wreck of a man with grief and dismay, mingled with a certain
inquisitiveness as to what dreary chain of circumstances had
dragged him down to such a doleful pass. Villiers felt together
with compassion all the relish of the amateur in mysteries, and
congratulated himself on his leisurely speculations outside the
restaurant.
They walked on in silence for some time, and more than
one passer-by stared in astonishment at the unaccustomed
The Great God Pan |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart: with a famous woman, whose face smiled out at him from his morning
paper or, huge and shockingly colored, from the sheets on the bill
boards.
He formed the habit of calling on her in the afternoons at her hotel,
and he saw that she liked it. It was often lonely, she explained.
He sent her flowers and cigarettes, and he found her poised and
restful, and sometimes, when she was off guard, with the lines of
old suffering in her face.
She sat still. She didn't fidget, as Nina did. She listened, too.
She was not as beautiful as she appeared on the stage, but she was
attractive, and he stilled his conscience with the knowledge that
The Breaking Point |
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 The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: island, a field of broken stones from the bigness of a child's
hand to that of his head, diversified by many mounds of the
same material, and walled by a rude rectangular enclosure.
Nothing grew there but a shrub or two with some white flowers;
nothing but the number of the mounds, and their disquieting
shape, indicated the presence of the dead.
'The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep!'
quoted Attwater as he entered by the open gateway into that
unholy close. 'Coral to coral, pebbles to pebbles,' he said,
'this has been the main scene of my activity in the South
Pacific. Some were good, and some bad, and the majority (of
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