| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: the expenditure of enough money to have bought a house and enough
energy to have built one. The bag I held in my hand was a black one,
sealskin, I think. The staggering thought of what the loss of my bag
meant to me put my finger on the bell and kept it there until the
porter came.
"Did you ring, sir?" he asked, poking his head through the curtains
obsequiously. McKnight objects that nobody can poke his head through
a curtain and be obsequious. But Pullman porters can and do.
"No," I snapped. "It rang itself. What in thunder do you mean by
exchanging my valise for this one? You'll have to find it if you
waken the entire car to do it. There are important papers in that
 The Man in Lower Ten |
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 The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: making or the washing was properly begun by the two girls in the
kitchen. Then, at about eight o'clock, she would take Clara's
coffee up to her, and chat with her while she drank it, telling her
what was going on in the house. Old Mrs. Ericson frequently said
that her daughter-in-law would not know what day of the week it was
if Johanna did not tell her every morning. Mrs. Ericson despised
and pitied Johanna, but did not wholly dislike her. The one thing
she hated in her daughter-in-law above everything else was the way
in which Clara could come it over people. It enraged her that the
affairs of her son's big, barnlike house went on as well as they
did, and she used to feel that in this world we have to wait
 The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |