| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: accost him.
"Give you a good-morning, sir," said I.
"And a good-morning to you, sir," said he.
"You bide tryst with Prestongrange?" I asked.
"I do, sir, and I pray your business with that gentleman be more
agreeable than mine," was his reply.
"I hope at least that yours will be brief, for I suppose you pass
before me," said I.
"All pass before me," he said, with a shrug and a gesture upward of the
open hands. "It was not always so, sir, but times change. It was not
so when the sword was in the scale, young gentleman, and the virtues of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: should he screw himself to that if the door he had seen closed were
at present open? He could hold to the idea that the closing had
practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance offered him to
descend, depart, get off the ground and never again profane it.
This conception held together, it worked; but what it meant for him
depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent
action, or rather his recent inaction, had engendered. The image
of the "presence" whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -
this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he
stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to
him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his
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