| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: flitting by, very fast; the men walked like scissors; the women trod like
cats. And nobody knew--nobody cared. Even if she broke down, if at last,
after all these years, she were to cry, she'd find herself in the lock-up
as like as not.
But at the thought of crying it was as though little Lennie leapt in his
gran's arms. Ah, that's what she wants to do, my dove. Gran wants to cry.
If she could only cry now, cry for a long time, over everything, beginning
with her first place and the cruel cook, going on to the doctor's, and then
the seven little ones, death of her husband, the children's leaving her,
and all the years of misery that led up to Lennie. But to have a proper
cry over all these things would take a long time. All the same, the time
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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 Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards the
house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found every
fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital
and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost
unrecognisable, but still breathing, still thinking, still
remembering; you would have understood that life in the lazaretto
is an ordeal from which the nerves of a man's spirit shrink, even
as his eye quails under the brightness of the sun; you would have
felt it was (even today) a pitiful place to visit and a hell to
dwell in. It is not the fear of possible infection. That seems a
little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the disgust
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