| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: dodo. For a shilling down, sixpence in her money-box, and an
American gold dollar which I happened to find in my pocket, I
bought the creature soul and body. She declared her intention
to accompany me to the ends of the earth; and had to be
chidden by her sire for drawing comparisons between myself
and her uncle William, highly damaging to the latter.
Dinner was scarce done, the cloth was not yet removed, when
Miss Agnes must needs climb into my lap with her stamp
album, a relic of the generosity of Uncle William. There are
few things I despise more than old stamps, unless perhaps it be
crests; for cattle (from the Carthew Chillinghams down to the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: woman that the children, equally beloved by husband and wife, had
never come between them. Suddenly she found herself at times more
mother than wife, though hitherto she had been more wife than mother.
However ready she had been to sacrifice her fortune and even her
children to the man who had chosen her, loved her, adored her, and to
whom she was still the only woman in the world, the remorse she felt
for the weakness of her maternal love threw her into terrible
alternations of feeling. As a wife, she suffered in heart; as a
mother, through her children; as a Christian, for all.
She kept silence, and hid the cruel struggle in her soul. Her husband,
sole arbiter of the family fate, was the master by whose will it must
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: You were gone ere the fragile papyrus,
(That bragged you eternal!) decayed.
The avatars
But illumine their limited evens
And vanish like plunging stars;
They are fixed in the whirling heavens
No firmer than falling stars;
Brief lords of the changing soul, they pass
Like a breath from the face of a glass,
Or a blossom of summer blown shallop-like over
The clover
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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 Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: There was a case, or something, some years ago."
"What case?"
"A divorce--or something--I don't know. But I have heard that he
almost had to leave the schools. If it hadn't been for Professor
Russell standing up for him, they say he would have had to
leave."
"Was he divorced, do you mean?"
"No, but he got himself mixed up in a divorce case. I forget the
particulars, but I know it was something very disagreeable. It
was among artistic people."
Ann Veronica was silent for a while.
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