| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: Is that it? How did you know that I wanted anybody to be kind to
me?"
"How strange you are!" she said thoughtfully.
"It's hard for a man who has gone through what I have gone through
to feel like other people. Has that occurred to you? . . . " He
looked up at last . . . "Mrs. Anthony, I can't bear the sight of
the fellow." She met his eyes without flinching and he added, "You
want to go to him now." His mild automatic manner seemed the effect
of tremendous self-restraint--and yet she remembered him always like
that. She felt cold all over.
"Why, of course, I must go to him," she said with a slight start.
 Chance |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: think that He had set Saint Michael on my tracks. Suppose that the
devil and the police should let me go on as I please, so as to nab me
in the nick of time? Did any one ever see the like! But there, this is
folly . . ."
Castanier went along the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, slackening his
pace as he neared the Rue Richer. There on the second floor of a block
of buildings which looked out upon some gardens lived the unconscious
cause of Castanier's crime--a young woman known in the quarter as Mme.
de la Garde. A concise history of certain events in the cashier's past
life must be given in order to explain these facts, and to give a
complete presentment of the crisis when he yielded to temptation.
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