| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: is to stay to lunch.' It was then just on one.
'I'll stay,' she said, 'if you will promise not to make any sort of
effort. I shouldn't mind, but it would distress you.'
'I promise absolutely,' I said, and ironical joy rose up in me, and
the telegram burned in my pocket.
She would talk of it, though I found it hard to let her go on,
knowing and knowing and knowing as I did that for that day at least
it could not be. There was very little about herself that she
wanted to tell me; she was there confessed a woman whom joy had
overcome; it was understood that we both accepted that situation.
But in the details which she asked me to take charge of it was plain
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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 Message by Honore de Balzac: together at the sight of a snake by a woodside. At the risk of
spoiling my story and of being taken for a coxcomb, I state my
intention at the outset.
I myself played a part in this almost commonplace tragedy; so if
it fails to interest you, the failure will be in part my own
fault, in part owing to historical veracity. Plenty of things in
real life are superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half
of art to select from realities those which contain possibilities
of poetry.
In 1819 I was traveling from Paris to Moulins. The state of my
finances obliged me to take an outside place. Englishmen, as you
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