If I should be asked why I again allied myself with the “Colonel,” I already have given a partial answer. There was a sentimental reason, too. It was a case of “first love.” I wanted to go back to that early love, to try to recapture some of the old feeling, the former rapture. I should have realized that one does not go back, that one of the near impossibilities of life is to recapture the old thrill. Those who can are among the earth’s most fortunate. This ten-week season was expensive. The pleasure of trying to recapture cost me $70,000 in losses. There were, however, compensations: there was the unending circus of “Mutt and Jeff,” the four-feet-seven “Sasha” Philipoff and the six-feet-two “Colonel.” There was a repertoire that interested me. It was a pleasure once again to luxuriate in the splendors of _Le Coq d’Or_, although the investiture had become a shade or two tarnished from too much travel and too little touching-up. It was refreshing to see Baronova and Toumanova in brisk competition again in the same company, for the latter had already become one of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo defections. It is difficult for me to realize that Irina Baronova no longer dances. She was the youngest of the “baby ballerinas.” Gentle, shy, with honey-colored hair, Irina was born in Leningrad, and eventually reached Paris, with her family, by way of the Orient. About her was a simple, classical beauty, despite the fact that she always found it necessary to disguise (on the stage) her rather impudent little nose in a variety of ways by the use of make-up putty. It was so when she started in as a tiny child to study with the great lady of the Maryinsky, Olga Preobrajenska, whose nose also has a tilt. To George Balanchine must go the credit for discovering Baronova in Preobrajenska’s School in Paris, when he was on the search for new talents at the time of the formation of the de Basil-Blum Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. About her work there was always something joyful and yet, at the same time, something that was at once wistful and tender. As a classical dancer there was something so subtle about her art that its true value and her true value came only slowly upon one. There was no flash; everything about her, every movement, every gesture, flowed one into another--as in swimming. But not only was she a great classical dancer, she was the younger generation’s most accomplished mime.