| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: baby? [A pause.]
MISS PRISM. Lady Bracknell, I admit with shame that I do not know.
I only wish I did. The plain facts of the case are these. On the
morning of the day you mention, a day that is for ever branded on
my memory, I prepared as usual to take the baby out in its
perambulator. I had also with me a somewhat old, but capacious
hand-bag in which I had intended to place the manuscript of a work
of fiction that I had written during my few unoccupied hours. In a
moment of mental abstraction, for which I never can forgive myself,
I deposited the manuscript in the basinette, and placed the baby in
the hand-bag.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: "Tell us the yarn, Quatermain," said Good. "You have often promised to
tell me, and you never have."
"You had better not ask me to," he answered, "for it is a longish one."
"All right," I said, "the evening is young, and there is some more
port."
Thus adjured, he filled his pipe from a jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco
that was always standing on the mantelpiece, and still walking up and
down the room, began--
"It was, I think, in the March of '69 that I was up in Sikukuni's
country. It was just after old Sequati's time, and Sikukuni had got
into power--I forget how. Anyway, I was there. I had heard that the
Long Odds |
