| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: add: 'And what did you see? Have I ever spoken of the Duke excepting
in public? Have you detected in my eyes----?'--'No,' said I, 'but in
his. And you have eight times made me go to Saint-Thomas d'Aquin to
see you listening to the same mass as he.'--'Ah!' she exclaimed, 'then
I have made you jealous!'--Oh! I only wish I could be!' said I,
admiring the pliancy of her quick intelligence, and these acrobatic
feats which can only be successful in the eyes of the blind. 'But by
dint of going to church I have become very incredulous. On the day of
my first cold, and your first treachery, when you thought I was in
bed, you received the Duke, and you told me you had seen no one.'--'Do
you know that your conduct is infamous?'--'In what respect? I consider
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Camille by Alexandre Dumas: the material help which it contained. I can write to you, then,
to-day. This letter is from your father, and this is what it
says:
"MADAME: I have just learned that you are ill. If I were at Paris
I would come and ask after you myself; if my son were here I
would send him; but I can not leave C., and Armand is six or
seven hundred leagues from here; permit me, then, simply to write
to you, madame, to tell you how pained I am to hear of your
illness, and believe in my sincere wishes for your speedy
recovery.
One of my good friends, M. H., will call on you; will you kindly
Camille |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Rinkitink In Oz by L. Frank Baum: been left, however, by which he might escape and he
decided to see where it led to.
So, going to the first door, he opened it and
ventured slowly into the dimly lighted corridor. When
he had advanced a few steps he heard the door of his
room slam shut behind him. He ran back at once, but the
door of rock fitted so closely into the wall that he
found it impossible to open it again. That did not
matter so much, however, for the room was a prison and
the only way of escape seemed ahead of him.
Along the corridor he crept until, turning a
Rinkitink In Oz |
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 In the Cage by Henry James: There were the brazen women, as she called them, of the higher and
the lower fashion, whose squanderings and graspings, whose
struggles and secrets and love-affairs and lies, she tracked and
stored up against them till she had at moments, in private, a
triumphant vicious feeling of mastery and ease, a sense of carrying
their silly guilty secrets in her pocket, her small retentive
brain, and thereby knowing so much more about them than they
suspected or would care to think. There were those she would have
liked to betray, to trip up, to bring down with words altered and
fatal; and all through a personal hostility provoked by the
lightest signs, by their accidents of tone and manner, by the
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