| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: She would stand up in front of him and put her hands on his
shoulders and look into his face.
"Clean eyes?" she would say. "--still?"
Then she would take his ears in her little firm hands and kiss very
methodically his eyes and his forehead and his cheeks and at last
his lips. Her own eyes would suddenly brim bright with tears.
"GO," she would say.
That was the end.
It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit
fairyland to this grey world again.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: springs which move the panels. By pressing a knob thus hidden, the
queen was able to open certain panels known to her alone, behind
which, sunk in the wall, were hiding-places, oblong like the panels,
and more or less deep. It is difficult, even in these days of
dilapidation, for the best-trained eye to detect which of those panels
is thus hinged; but when the eye was distracted by colors and gilding,
cleverly used to conceal the joints, we can readily conceive that to
find one or two such panels among two hundred was almost an impossible
thing.
At the moment when Mary Stuart laid her hand on the somewhat
complicated lock of the door of this oratory, the queen-mother, who
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