Page:Hermione and her little group of serious thinkers (1923, c1916).djvu/134

 THE EXOTIC AND THE UNEMPLOYED

E'VE been taking up the Exotic this week—in poetry and painting, you know, and all that sort of thing—and its influence on our civilization.

Really, it's wonderful—simply wonderful! Quite different from the Erotic, you know, and from the Esoteric, too—though they're all mixed up with it sometimes.

Odd, isn't it, how all these new movements seem to be connected with one another?

One of the chief differences between the Exotic in art and other things—such as the Esoteric, for instance—is that nearly everything Exotic seems to have crept into our art from abroad.

Don't you think some of those foreign ideas are apt to be—well, dangerous? That is, to the untrained mind?

You can carry them too far, you know—and if you do they work into your subconsciousness.

One of the girls—she belongs to the same Little Group of Advanced Thinkers that I do—has been so taken with the Exotic that she wears orchids all the [120]