| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: to her, and hanging over her balcony on that of seeing your cab
drive up. I don't know what you want more."
Little Bilham after a moment found it. "Only just to know what
proves to you that I like HER."
"Oh if what I've just mentioned isn't enough to make you do it,
you're a stony-hearted little fiend. Besides"--Strether encouraged
his fancy's flight--"you showed your inclination in the way you
kept her waiting, kept her on purpose to see if she cared enough
for you."
His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause. "I didn't
keep her waiting. I came at the hour. I wouldn't have kept her
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: going through. Mabel Andrews' letters from Boulogne came regularly.
When August went by, with no letters save Harvey's, begging her to come
back, she gave up at last. In the little church on Sundays, with Jennie
on one side ard Aunt Harriet on the other, she voiced small silent
prayers - that the thing she feared had not happened. But she could not
think of Henri as not living. He was too strong, too vital.
She did not understand herself those days. She was desperately unhappy.
Sometimes she wondered if it would not be easier to know the truth, even
if that truth comprehended the worst.
Once she received, from some unknown hand, a French journal, and pored
over it for days with her French dictionary, to find if it contained any
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: look I knew so well, that remote clear look as if she had gone
far away even though I held her beautiful body so close,
and was now on some snowy mountain regarding me from a
distance.
"I feel it quite clearly," she said to me. "It gives me a deep
sympathy with what you feel, no doubt more strongly still. But
what I feel, even what you feel, dearest, does not convince me that it
is right. Until I am sure of that, of course I cannot do as you wish."
Ellador, at times like this, always reminded me of Epictetus.
"I will put you in prison!" said his master. "My body, you mean,"
replied Epictetus calmly. "I will cut your head off," said his
Herland |
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 Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: Lady Muriel looked at him enquiringly, but she seemed to have learned
by intuition, what years of experience had taught me, that the way to
elicit Arthur's deepest thoughts was neither to assent nor dissent,
but simply to listen.
"At that time," he went on, "a great tidal wave of selfishness was
sweeping over human thought. Right and Wrong had somehow been
transformed into Gain and Loss, and Religion had become a sort of
commercial transaction. We may be thankful that our preachers are
beginning to take a nobler view of life."
"But is it not taught again and again in the Bible?" I ventured to ask.
"Not in the Bible as a whole," said Arthur. "In the Old Testament,
Sylvie and Bruno |
