Today's Stichomancy for Tyra Banks

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac:

glanced at her husband in evident and abject terror that spoke of complete prostration of body and mind; she seemed crushed by a tyranny both mental and physical. The Count jerked his head towards her; she construed this as a permission to speak.

"I heard all that you said, monsieur. Tell my father that if he knew all he would forgive me. . . . I did not think there was such torture in the world as this; it is more than I can endure, monsieur!--But I will not give way as long as I live," she said, turning to her husband. "I am a mother.--Tell my father that I have never sinned against him in spite of appearances!" she cried aloud in her despair.

Father Goriot

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay:

be fading away. - .."

"There is Alppain!" said Gangnet, touching his arm.

The deep, glowing disk of the blue sun peeped above the sea. Maskull was struck to silence. He was hardly so much looking, as feeling. His emotions were unutterable. His soul seemed too strong for his body. The great blue orb rose rapidly out of the water, like an awful eye watching him.... it shot above the sea with a bound, and Alppain's day commenced.

"What do you feel?" Gangnet still held his arm.

"I have set myself against the Infinite," muttered Maskull.

Suddenly his chaos of passions sprang together, and a wonderful idea

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell:

with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly as students. Indeed, the slightest intercourse with them could not fail to make it evident. Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is truly distressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people. One notices it all the more for the shock. To get a prosaic answer from a man whose appearance and surroundings betoken better things is not calculated to dull that answer's effect. Aston, in a pamphlet on the Altaic tongues, cites an instance which is so much to the point that I venture to repeat it here. He was a true Chinaman, he says, who, when his English master asked him what he thought of

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 Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac:

amounted to two millions five hundred thousand francs. The next day Rigou had the names changed; Monsieur Gaubertin took the woods, Rigou and Soudry the vineyards and the farms. The chateau and the park were sold over again in small lots among the sons of the soil, the peasantry,--excepting the pavilion, its dependencies, and fifty surrounding acres, which Monsieur Gaubertin retained as a gift to his poetic and sentimental spouse.

Many years after these events, during the year 1837, one of the most remarkable political writers of the day, Emile Blondet, reached the last stages of a poverty which he had so far hidden beneath an outward