Today's Stichomancy for Louis B. Mayer

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence:

his fist. "I'll show yer, yer young jockey!"

"All right!" said Paul viciously, putting his head on one side. "Show me!"

He would at that moment dearly have loved to have a smack at something. Morel was half crouching, fists up, ready to spring. The young man stood, smiling with his lips.

"Ussha!" hissed the father, swiping round with a great stroke just past his son's face. He dared not, even though so close, really touch the young man, but swerved an inch away.

"Right!" said Paul, his eyes upon the side of his father's mouth, where in another instant his fist would have hit.

Sons and Lovers

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton:

unreal precision; then the twilight blotted them out, and the little house turned gray and spectral under its wizened apple-branches.

Charity's heart contracted. The first fall of night after a day of radiance often gave her a sense of hidden menace: it was like looking out over the world as it would be when love had gone from it. She wondered if some day she would sit in that same place and watch in vain for her lover....

His bicycle-bell sounded down the lane, and in a minute she was at the gate and his eyes were laughing in hers.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield:

"Du lieber Gott! Where? How?"

"Outside the hairdresser's shop in the Station Road."

"Jesus and Maria! Has she no water with her?"--he seized his carafe-- "nobody beside her?"

"Nothing."

"Where is my coat? No matter, I shall catch a cold on the chest. Willingly, I shall catch one...You are ready to come with me?"

"No," I said; "you can take the waiter."

"But she must have a woman. I cannot be so indelicate as to attempt to loosen her stays."

"Modern souls oughtn't to wear them," said I. He pushed past me and

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 Sportsman by Xenophon:

Heracles was distributing to the heroes of Hellas (lit. the first of the Hellenes) prizes of valour, to Telamon he gave."

[19] See Hom. "Il." v. 640; Strab. xiii. 595.

[20] See Diod. iv. 32; i. 42.

Of Meleager[21] be it said, whereas the honours which he won are manifest, the misfortunes on which he fell, when his father[22] in old age forgot the goddess, were not of his own causing.[23]

[21] For the legend of Meleager see "Il." ix. 524-599, dramatised by both Sophocles and Euripides, and in our day by Swinburne, "Atalanta in Calydon." Cf. Paus. iii. 8. 9; viii. 54. 4; Ov. "Met." viii. 300; Grote, "H. G." i. 195.