| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: processions, liked them at Bournemouth and on the pier quite as
much as at Chalk Farm or anywhere, she learned after a little not
to be worried by his perpetual counting of the figures that made
them up. There were dreadful women in particular, usually fat and
in men's caps and write shoes, whom he could never let alone--not
that she cared; it was not the great world, the world of Cocker's
and Ladle's and Thrupp's, but it offered an endless field to his
faculties of memory, philosophy, and frolic. She had never
accepted him so much, never arranged so successfully for making him
chatter while she carried on secret conversations. This separate
commerce was with herself; and if they both practised a great
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: never succeeded in teaching her to say her own name Stephanie.
Philippe was sustained in his agonizing enterprise by hope, which
never abandoned him. When, on fine autumn mornings, he found the
countess sitting peacefully on a bench, beneath a poplar now
yellowing, the poor lover would sit at her feet, looking into her eyes
as long as she would let him, hoping ever that the light that was in
them would become intelligent. Sometimes the thought deluded him that
he saw those hard immovable rays softening, vibrating, living, and he
cried out,--
"Stephanie! Stephanie! thou hearest me, thou seest me!"
But she listened to that cry as to a noise, the soughing of the wind
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: which Memory draws out stories at haphazard, like numbers in a
lottery. There are plenty of tales just as strange and just as well
hidden still left; but some day, you may be sure, their turn will
come.
One day my charwoman, a working man's wife, came to beg me to honor
her sister's wedding with my presence. If you are to realize what this
wedding was like you must know that I paid my charwoman, poor
creature, four francs a month; for which sum she came every morning to
make my bed, clean my shoes, brush my clothes, sweep the room, and
make ready my breakfast, before going to her day's work of turning the
handle of a machine, at which hard drudgery she earned five-pence. Her
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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 The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: as much. But without such love I'd give only a husk--a body without soul."
Love, then, was the sacred and holy flame of life that sanctioned the
begetting of children. Marriage might be a necessity of modern time, but it
was not the vital issue. Carley's anguish revealed strange and hidden
truths. In some inexplicable way Nature struck a terrible balance--revenged
herself upon a people who had no children, or who brought into the world
children not created by the divinity of love, unyearned for, and therefore
somehow doomed to carry on the blunders and burdens of life.
Carley realized how right and true it might be for her to throw herself
away upon an inferior man, even a fool or a knave, if she loved him with
that great and natural love of woman; likewise it dawned upon her how false
The Call of the Canyon |
