| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: his grizzled hair. `Sometimes I git awful sore on this place and want
to quit, but my wife she always say we better stick it out. The babies
come along pretty fast, so it look like it be hard to move, anyhow.
I guess she was right, all right. We got this place clear now.
We pay only twenty dollars an acre then, and I been offered a hundred.
We bought another quarter ten years ago, and we got it most paid for.
We got plenty boys; we can work a lot of land. Yes, she is a good
wife for a poor man. She ain't always so strict with me, neither.
Sometimes maybe I drink a little too much beer in town, and when I
come home she don't say nothing. She don't ask me no questions.
We always get along fine, her and me, like at first.
My Antonia |
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 Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: love, they do not give themselves, and that the conquest of one
of them would prove a harder matter than the conquest of Europe.
"Madame," returned Armand, "I have not time to wait. I am a
spoilt child, as you told me yourself. When I seriously resolve
to have that of which we have been speaking, I shall have it."
"You will have it?" queried she, and there was a trace of
surprise in her loftiness.
"I shall have it."
"Oh! you would do me a great pleasure by `resolving' to have it.
For curiosity's sake, I should be delighted to know how you would
set about it----"
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