| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: "Only a couple of minutes later and you'd have made me blunder
against the fellow poking about here with his damned dark lantern."
The widow of Mr Verloc, motionless in the middle of the shop, said
insistently:
"Go in and put that light out, Tom. It will drive me crazy."
She saw vaguely his vehement gesture of refusal. Nothing in the
world would have induced Ossipon to go into the parlour. He was
not superstitious, but there was too much blood on the floor; a
beastly pool of it all round the hat. He judged he had been
already far too near that corpse for his peace of mind - for the
safety of his neck, perhaps!
The Secret Agent |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: successes. He left me behind him long ago; he soared up over my
head, and cut a figure in the world that I couldn't cut--anyhow.
He was still a year short of forty, and they say now that he would
have been in office and very probably in the new Cabinet if he had
lived. At school he always beat me without effort--as it were by
nature. We were at school together at Saint Athelstan's College in
West Kensington for almost all our school time. He came into the
school as my co-equal, but he left far above me, in a blaze of
scholarships and brilliant performance. Yet I think I made a fair
average running. And it was at school I heard first of the Door in
the Wall--that I was to hear of a second time only a month before
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