| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: seen it in that light before. Why hadn't he seen it in that
light before?
Indeed, wasn't he a sort of traitor?....He wondered how the
aerial fleet must look from down there. Tremendous, no doubt,
and dwarfing all the buildings.
He was passing between Manchester and Liverpool, Kurt told him; a
gleaming band across the prospect was the Ship Canal, and a
weltering ditch of shipping far away ahead, the Mersey estuary.
Bert was a Southerner; he had never been north of the Midland
counties, and the multitude of factories and chimneys--the latter
for the most part obsolete and smokeless now, superseded by huge
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: I was quelled. Such a feat is comparatively easy in a small class;
but I have misbehaved in smaller classes and under eyes more
Olympian than Fleeming Jenkin's. He was simply a man from whose
reproof one shrank; in manner the least buckrammed of mankind, he
had, in serious moments, an extreme dignity of goodness. So it was
that he obtained a power over the most insubordinate of students,
but a power of which I was myself unconscious. I was inclined to
regard any professor as a joke, and Fleeming as a particularly good
joke, perhaps the broadest in the vast pleasantry of my curriculum.
I was not able to follow his lectures; I somehow dared not
misconduct myself, as was my customary solace; and I refrained from
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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 Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: "Yes, monsieur; but at that time I had a most devoted friend in
Mademoiselle Coralie, and I was so unhappy as to lose her. It was my
grief at her death that made me return to my country home."
"That is right, monsieur," said Camusot; "I commend your frankness; it
will be thoroughly appreciated."
Lucien, it will be seen, was prepared to make a clean breast of it.
"On your return to Paris you lived even more expensively than before,"
Camusot went on. "You lived like a man who might have about sixty
thousand francs a year."
"Yes, monsieur."
"Who supplied you with the money?"
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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 Moon-Face and Other Stories by Jack London: stupid like the ox; and he will follow you about, smoking; the cigar, like a
little dog, your little dog, trotting at your back. He will not know he is
doing it, but he will be doing it just the same. Don't I know, Chris? Oh, I
have watched you, watched you, so often, and loved you for it, and loved you
again for it, because you were so delightfully and blindly unaware of what you
were doing."
"I'm almost bursting with vanity from listening to you," he laughed, passing
his arm around her and drawing her against him.
"Yes," she whispered, "and in this very moment, when you are laughing at all
that I have said, you, the feel of you, your soul,--call it what you will, it
is you,--is calling for all the love that is in me."
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