| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: beauty's reading-room; and a sometime custom-house officer, named
Denisart, with a ribbon in his button-hole, followed the example.
Croizeau chose to look upon Denisart as a rival. '/Monsieur/,' he said
afterwards, 'I did not know what to buy for you!'
"That speech should give you an idea of the man. The Sieur Croizeau
happens to belong to a particular class of old man which should be
known as 'Coquerels' since Henri Monnier's time; so well did Monnier
render the piping voice, the little mannerisms, little queue, little
sprinkling of powder, little movements of the head, prim little
manner, and tripping gait in the part of Coquerel in /La Famille
Improvisee/. This Croizeau used to hand over his halfpence with a
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton: them with an indulgence that kept sourness out of
his cynicism and inevitably recurring weariness and
disgust; his ardent imagination had consoled itself
with the vision of a future when man should live in
a world made reasonable by the triumph of ideals
that now lurked half ashamed in the high spaces of
the human mind.
He looked back in wonder at the moment of wild
regret and protest--the bitterer in its silence--
when they had told him he must die; when in the
last rally of the vital forces he had believed his will
Rezanov |
