| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: strength of his rancorous nature, and the audacious portress lay
trampled under his feet.
"Come, reassure yourself, my dear madame," he remarked, holding out
his hand. The touch of the cold, serpent-like skin made a terrible
impression upon the portress. It brought about something like a
physical reaction, which checked her emotion; Mme. Fontaine's toad,
Astaroth, seemed to her to be less deadly than this poison-sac that
wore a sandy wig and spoke in tones like the creaking of a hinge.
"Do not imagine that I am frightening you to no purpose," Fraisier
continued. (La Cibot's feeling of repulsion had not escaped him.) "The
affairs which made Mme. la Presidente's dreadful reputation are so
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: more elemental thing, which gave its values to the other. Was it
that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of
necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations,
or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove
life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of
survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? She
went to Capes with that riddle and put it to him very carefully
and clearly, and he talked well--he always talked at some length
when she took a difficulty to him--and sent her to a various
literature upon the markings of butterflies, the incomprehensible
elaboration and splendor of birds of Paradise and humming-birds'
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