| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: You couldn't ever feel her rudder. It wasn't any more labor to steer
her than it is to count the Republican vote in a South Carolina election.
One morning, just at daybreak, the last trip she ever made, they took
her rudder aboard to mend it; I didn't know anything about it; I backed
her out from the wood-yard and went a-weaving down the river all serene.
When I had gone about twenty-three miles, and made four horribly crooked
crossings----'
'Without any rudder?'
'Yes--old Capt. Tom appeared on the roof and began to find fault
with me for running such a dark night--'
'Such a DARK NIGHT ?--Why, you said----'
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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 Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: or her husband's, or Rachel's had penetrated and stung. She was
half-moved to cry, "Stop, William; explain!" and would have returned
to the subject at luncheon if William had not shown himself inscrutable
and chill, lifting fragments of salad on the point of his fork,
with the gesture of a man pronging seaweed, detecting gravel,
suspecting germs.
"If you all die of typhoid I won't be responsible!" he snapped.
"If you die of dulness, neither will I," Helen echoed in her heart.
She reflected that she had never yet asked him whether he had been
in love. They had got further and further from that subject instead
of drawing nearer to it, and she could not help feeling it a relief
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