| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: possibility for really noble qualities among the people at large.
Neither did they start off on predatory excursions to get more
land from somebody else, or to get more food from somebody else,
to maintain their struggling mass.
Not at all. They sat down in council together and thought it
out. Very clear, strong thinkers they were. They said: "With our
best endeavors this country will support about so many people,
with the standard of peace, comfort, health, beauty, and progress
we demand. Very well. That is all the people we will make."
There you have it. You see, they were Mothers, not in our
sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill
 Herland |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: themselves, and one and all loyally devoted to princes whom they only
see at a distance. The historical house /incognito/ is as quaint a
survival as a piece of ancient tapestry. Vegetating somewhere among
them there is sure to be an uncle or a brother, a lieutenant-general,
an old courtier of the Kings's, who wears the red ribbon of the order
of Saint-Louis, and went to Hanover with the Marechal de Richelieu:
and here you will find him like a stray leaf out of some old pamphlet
of the time of Louis Quinze.
This fossil greatness finds a rival in another house, wealthier,
though of less ancient lineage. Husband and wife spend a couple of
months of every winter in Paris, bringing back with them its frivolous
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