| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: trying to reach me through you?"
Richey's flippancy is often a cloak for deeper feeling. He dropped
it now. "Yes," he said, "she's after the notes, of course. And
I'll tell you I felt like a poltroon - whatever that may be - when
I turned her down. She stood by the door with her face white, and
told me contemptuously that I could save you from a murder charge
and wouldn't do it. She made me feel like a cur. I was just as
guilty as if I could have obliged her. She hinted that there were
reasons and she laid my attitude to beastly motives."
"Nonsense," I said, as easily as I could. Hotchkiss had gone to
the window. "She was excited. There are no 'reasons,' whatever
The Man in Lower Ten |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: Elizabeth-Jane, while her silent mother mused on other
things than topography. "It is huddled all together; and it
is shut in by a square wall of trees, like a plot of garden
ground by a box-edging."
Its squareness was, indeed, the characteristic which most
struck the eye in this antiquated borough, the borough of
Casterbridge--at that time, recent as it was, untouched by
the faintest sprinkle of modernism. It was compact as a box
of dominoes. It had no suburbs--in the ordinary sense.
Country and town met at a mathematical line.
To birds of the more soaring kind Casterbridge must have
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: to strike the keyboard with both hands.
"Only fancy!" answered Ignat, surprised at the broadening grin on
his face in the mirror.
"Impudence! Impudence!" they heard behind them the voice of Mavra
Kuzminichna who had entered silently. "How he's grinning, the fat mug!
Is that what you're here for? Nothing's cleared away down there and
Vasilich is worn out. Just you wait a bit!"
Ignat left off smiling, adjusted his belt, and went out of the
room with meekly downcast eyes.
"Aunt, I did it gently," said the boy.
"I'll give you something gently, you monkey you!" cried Mavra
War and Peace |
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 Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: last, the breeze came with the darkling ripple that ran very blue
on a pale sea, they all went in the same direction together. For
this was the homeward-bound fleet from the far-off ends of the
earth, and a Falmouth fruit-schooner, the smallest of them all, was
heading the flight. One could have imagined her very fair, if not
divinely tall, leaving a scent of lemons and oranges in her wake.
The next day there were very few ships in sight from our mast-heads
- seven at most, perhaps, with a few more distant specks, hull
down, beyond the magic ring of the horizon. The spell of the fair
wind has a subtle power to scatter a white-winged company of ships
looking all the same way, each with its white fillet of tumbling
The Mirror of the Sea |
