| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: the house has a long, dark, damp, and evil-smelling passage-way, at
the end of which flickers the pallid gleam of an oil lamp, and if
beneath that gleam appears the horrid face of a withered old woman
with fleshless fingers, ah, then! and we say it in the interests of
young and pretty women, that woman is lost. She is at the mercy of the
first man of her acquaintance who sees her in that Parisian slough.
There is more than one street in Paris where such a meeting may lead
to a frightful drama, a bloody drama of death and love, a drama of the
modern school.
Unhappily, this scene, this modern drama itself, will be comprehended
by only a small number of persons; and it is a pity to tell the tale
Ferragus |
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 Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: been hearing of this man as a crank agitator who had set himself
in opposition to her father and his friends for selfish reasons.
Her father had dropped vague hints about his unsavory life. The
Stetson write-up had given a very different story. If it told the
truth, many things she had been brought up to accept without
question would bear study.
James suavely explained. "The facts are true, but not the
inferences from the facts. Jeff takes rather a one-sided view of a
very complex situation. But he's perfectly honest in it, so far as
that goes."
"You voted for his bill, didn't you?" Alice asked.
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