| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: hair, and said it was grown long and silky, and he said they would go back
to Denmark now. He asked her why her feet were bare, and what the marks on
her back were. Then he put her head on his shoulder, and picked her up,
and carried her away, away! She laughed--she could feel her face against
his brown beard. His arms were so strong.
As she lay there dreaming, with the ants running over her naked feet, and
with her brown curls lying in the sand, a Hottentot came up to her. He was
dressed in ragged yellow trousers, and a dirty shirt, and torn jacket. He
had a red handkerchief round his head, and a felt hat above that. His nose
was flat, his eyes like slits, and the wool on his head was gathered into
little round balls. He came to the milk-bush, and looked at the little
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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 Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: fascinating, and delightful in him - in which, in fact, he misses
the true pleasure and joy of living. He is also, under existing
conditions, very insecure. An enormously wealthy merchant may be -
often is - at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that
are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so,
or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his
ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds
himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now,
nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing
should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what
is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no
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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 The Purse by Honore de Balzac: natural under the circumstances, which the good woman made as to
his accident, and the friendly intervention of the tenants
occupying the fourth floor, he could not hinder her from
following the instinct of her kind; she mentioned the two
strangers, speaking of them as prompted by the interests of her
policy and the subterranean opinions of the porter's lodge.
"Ah," said she, "they were, no doubt, Mademoiselle Leseigneur and
her mother, who have lived here these four years. We do not know
exactly what these ladies do; in the morning, only till the hour
of noon, an old woman who is half deaf, and who never speaks any
more than a wall, comes in to help them; in the evening, two or
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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 The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: state, the open conspiracy of all the sane men in the world against
the things that break us up into wars and futilities. And here am
I--who have the light--WANDERING! Just wandering!"
He shrugged his shoulders and came to stare at the torrent under the
bridge.
"You're getting ripe for London, Cheetah," said Amanda softly.
"I want somehow to get to work, to get my hands on definite things."
"How can we get back?"
She had to repeat her question presently.
"We can go on. Over the hills is Ochrida and then over another pass
is Presba, and from there we go down into Monastir and reach a
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