| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: while at the time; since he had never seen a family so brilliantly
equipped for failure. Wasn't it success to have kept him so
hatefully long? Wasn't it success to have drawn him in that first
morning at dejeuner, the Friday he came - it was enough to MAKE one
superstitious - so that he utterly committed himself, and this not
by calculation or on a signal, but from a happy instinct which made
them, like a band of gipsies, work so neatly together? They amused
him as much as if they had really been a band of gipsies. He was
still young and had not seen much of the world - his English years
had been properly arid; therefore the reversed conventions of the
Moreens - for they had THEIR desperate proprieties - struck him as
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: I followed what I supposed was their example; and, getting on the
roof, tried the shutters of each room. Both were secure; but I was
not to be beaten; and, with a little force, one of them flew open,
grazing, as it did so, the back of my hand. I remember, I put the
wound to my mouth, and stood for perhaps half a minute licking it
like a dog, and mechanically gazing behind me over the waste links
and the sea; and, in that space of time, my eye made note of a
large schooner yacht some miles to the north-east. Then I threw up
the window and climbed in.
I went over the house, and nothing can express my mystification.
There was no sign of disorder, but, on the contrary, the rooms were
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