Today's Stichomancy for Al Capone

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris:

eyes, the tenderness of regard he had inspired.

As other humans, too, began to grow weary of the expectation of constant perfection in their relationships, scenes similar to this one began to be repeated with increasing frequency. A loose shoe lace, a chipped fingernail, a shiny nose--all gradually became sources of romantic and emotional attraction, and those very characteristics that had before been viewed as defects soon came to be seen as emblems of the truly and desirably human, as guarantees of that unique inner fire that no amount of perfectly crafted plastic could equal.

The word "human" now began to be associated with the genuine, the

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot:

bore himself with the careless politeness of conscious superiority, and seemed to have the right clothes on by a certain natural affinity, without ever having to think about them. Rosamond was proud when he entered the room, and when he approached her with a distinguishing smile, she had a delicious sense that she was the object of enviable homage. If Lydgate had been aware of all the pride he excited in that delicate bosom, he might have been just as well pleased as any other man, even the most densely ignorant of humoral pathology or fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in. But Rosamond was not one

Middlemarch

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis:

"I've heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got up a dramatic club and gave a dandy play. I've always wished I had a chance to belong to a Little Theater, and give some European plays, or whimsical like Barrie, or a pageant."

He pronounced it "pagent"; he rhymed "pag" with "rag."

Carol nodded in the manner of a lady being kind to a tradesman, and one of her selves sneered, "Our Erik is indeed a lost John Keats."

He was appealing, "Do you suppose it would be possible to get up another dramatic club this coming fall?"

"Well, it might be worth thinking of." She came out of

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 Salome by Oscar Wilde:

regarder. Je vous ai deje dit cela.

HERODE. Vous ne dites que cela.

HERODIAS. Je le redis.

HERODE. Et la restauration du temple dont on a tant parle? Est-ce qu'on va faire quelque chose? On dit, n'est-ce pas que le voile du sanctuaire a disparu?

HERODIAS. C'est toi qui l'a pris. Tu parles e tort et e travers. Je ne veux pas rester ici. Rentrons.

HERODE. Salome, dansez pour moi.

HERODIAS. Je ne veux pas qu'elle danse.

SALOME. Je n'ai aucune envie de danser, tetrarque.