| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: questions: her reticence was a part of a role she had assumed.
Our ears were strained for the first throb of the motor as it
turned into the drive and commenced the climb to the house. Ten
minutes passed, fifteen, twenty. I saw Louise's hands grow rigid
as they clutched the arms of her chair. I watched Gertrude's
bright color slowly ebbing away, and around my own heart I
seemed to feel the grasp of a giant hand.
Twenty-five minutes, and then a sound. But it was not the chug
of the motor: it was the unmistakable rumble of the Casanova
hack. Gertrude drew aside the curtain and peered into the
darkness.
The Circular Staircase |
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 Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: A lonely man with only foreign worms
To cheer him in his last obscurity.
"But what it was that hurried me down here
To be among the ghosts, I leave to you.
My thanks are yours, no less, for one thing clear:
Though you are silent, what you say is true.
"There may have been the devil in my feet,
For down I blundered, like a fugitive,
To find the old room in Eleventh Street.
God save us! -- I came here again to live."
We rose at that, and all the ghosts rose then,
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