| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: followed her up the wooded path behind the house.
"It might be worth finding out," she rejoined with a musing
smile.
But he remained resolutely skeptical. "Oh, give them a year or
two more and they'll collapse--! His pictures will never sell,
you know. He'll never even get them into a show."
"I suppose not. And she'll never have time to do anything worth
while with her music."
They had reached a piny knoll high above the ledge on which the
house was perched. All about them stretched an empty landscape
of endless featureless wooded hills. "Think of sticking here
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Book of Remarkable Criminals by H. B. Irving: The early years of Jeanne de la Cour's career as a Phryne were
hardly more successful than her attempts at literature, acting
and journalism. True to her philosophy, she had driven one
lover, a German, to suicide, and brought another to his death by
over-doses of cantharides. On learning of the death of the
first, she reflected patriotically, "One German the less in
Paris!" That of the second elicited the matter-of-fact comment,
"It was bound to happen; he had no moderation." A third admirer,
who died in a hospital, was dismissed as "a fool who, in spite of
all, still respects women." But, in ruining her lovers, she had
ruined her own health. In 1865 she was compelled to enter a
A Book of Remarkable Criminals |
