| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: to vibrate; and there was a particular thrill in the idea that
Henry St. George might be a member of the party. For the young
aspirant he had remained a high literary figure, in spite of the
lower range of production to which he had fallen after his first
three great successes, the comparative absence of quality in his
later work. There had been moments when Paul Overt almost shed
tears for this; but now that he was near him - he had never met him
- he was conscious only of the fine original source and of his own
immense debt. After he had taken a turn or two up and down the
gallery he came out again and descended the steps. He was but
slenderly supplied with a certain social boldness - it was really a
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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 Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or three weeks afterwards,
when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a big
shell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece of
the iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head.
Well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again!
Was getting used to things already, you see. We all got so that we could
tell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn't always go under
shelter if it was a light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk;
and a man would say, 'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from
the sound of it, and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it.
If a shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;--
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