| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: knew well enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies
of life, that he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind
of high courage and directness he had always divined in her, made
him the more hopeless of her entering into the torturous
psychology of an act that he himself could no longer explain or
understand. It would have been easier had she been more complex,
more feminine--if he could have counted on her imaginative
sympathy or her moral obtuseness--but he was sure of neither. He
was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her.
Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his
action would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: him, sat down on the deck again as quiet as ever.
"Yes, it must be the work of some scoundrel ashore," I observed.
He pulled the edge of the hood well forward over his brow before he
muttered:
"A scoundrel. . . . Yes. . . . It's evident."
"Well," I said, "they can't get us, that's clear."
"No," he assented quietly, "they cannot."
We shaved the Cape very close to avoid an adverse current. On the
other side, by the effect of the land, the wind failed us so
completely for a moment that the Tremolino's two great lofty sails
hung idle to the masts in the thundering uproar of the seas
The Mirror of the Sea |
