| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: allowance, with no carriage, no luxury, no opera-box, none of the
divine accessories of the toilet, is no longer a wife, a maid, or a
townswoman; she is adrift, and becomes a chattel. The Carmelites will
not receive a married woman; it would be bigamy. Would her lover still
have anything to say to her? That is the question. Thus your perfect
lady may perhaps give occasion to calumny, never to slander."
"It is all so horribly true," said the Princesse de Cadignan.
"And so," said Blondet, "our 'perfect lady' lives between English
hypocrisy and the delightful frankness of the eighteenth century--a
bastard system, symptomatic of an age in which nothing that grows up
is at all like the thing that has vanished, in which transition leads
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: times before, and yet never learnt anything from it, like a stupid
man as I was; though what I learnt you may learn as easily as I
did.
And what did I find?
The pond at the bottom of the glen.
You know that pond, of course? You don't need to go there? Very
well. Then if you do, do not you know also that the pond is
always filling up with sand and mud; and that though we clean it
out every three or four years, it always fills again? Now where
does that sand and mud come from?
Down that stream, of course, which runs out of this bog. You see
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: Other designs might afterward arise."
How long it had been carrying on between them,
however, he was equally at a loss with herself to make out;
for at Oxford, where he had remained for choice ever since
his quitting London, he had had no means of hearing of her
but from herself, and her letters to the very last were
neither less frequent, nor less affectionate than usual.
Not the smallest suspicion, therefore, had ever occurred
to prepare him for what followed;--and when at last it
burst on him in a letter from Lucy herself, he had been
for some time, he believed, half stupified between
Sense and Sensibility |
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 The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories by Alice Dunbar: now. Ah, sweetheart, you've waited long, but you shall feast
now!" He was caressing something long and lithe and glittering
beneath his blanket.
In a masked dance it is easy to give a death-blow between the
shoulders. Two crowds meet and laugh and shout and mingle almost
inextricably, and if a shriek of pain should arise, it is not
noticed in the din, and when they part, if one should stagger and
fall bleeding to the ground, can any one tell who has given the
blow? There is nothing but an unknown stiletto on the ground,
the crowd has dispersed, and masks tell no tales anyway. There
is murder, but by whom? for what? Quien sabe?
The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories |
