The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: books and parchments on the office wall with one lick of its tongue,
and leave him in a minute standing in nakedness, if he gave way to it.
His endeavor, for many years, had been to control the spirit, and at
the age of twenty-nine he thought he could pride himself upon a life
rigidly divided into the hours of work and those of dreams; the two
lived side by side without harming each other. As a matter of fact,
this effort at discipline had been helped by the interests of a
difficult profession, but the old conclusion to which Ralph had come
when he left college still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views
with the melancholy belief that life for most people compels the
exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tattine by Ruth Ogden [Mrs. Charles W. Ide]: "Now, Joey, you wait here till I go bring something for a tombstone," Tattine
directed, and in a second she was back again with the cover of a box in one
hand and a red crayon in the other. Sitting flat upon the grass, she printed
on the cover in rather irregular letters:--
BORN--I don't know when. DIED June 17th.
LAVERACK SETTERS NOT ALLOWED.
This she put securely into place, while Joey raked up a little about the spot,
and they left the little rabbit grave looking very neat and tidy. The next
morning Tattine ran out to see how the little wild-wood plant was growing, and
then she stood with her arms akimbo in blank astonishment. The little grave
had disappeared. She kicked aside the loose earth, and saw that box and Bunny
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