With a fortune compounded in unequal parts of Yonkers Axminster and Waterbury Brass, her largess has been tossed with what has seemed akin to reckless abandon. A lady of “middle years,” she was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, one of several children of a member of the Chase Brass Company clan. A cultured lady, she went to the “right” finishing school, did the “right” things, and, it is said, early evinced an interest in singing and in the theatre. She married Thomas Ewing, to whom the sobriquet, “the Axminster carpet tycoon,” has been applied. On his death, Miss Chase was left with a fortune and two sons. Her distraction over the loss of her husband, so it is said, drove her to an early love as a possible means of assuaging her grief, viz., the dance. She took ballet lessons from Mikhail Mordkin; financed the newly formed Mordkin Ballet; in 1937, became its _prima ballerina_. So far as the record reveals, her debut was made in the Brass City of her birth, in no less a role than the Princess Aurora in _The Sleeping Beauty_. As a dancer, she is an excellent comedienne; yet for years she fancied herself as a classical _ballerina_. Her insistence on dancing in such ballets as _The Sleeping Beauty_, _Giselle_, _Pas de Quatre_, _Petroushka_, _Princess Aurora_, and most of all, _Les Sylphides_, was so regrettable that it raises the question that, if she is so unconscious of her own limitations as a dancer, what are her qualifications for the directorship of a ballet company? At the beginning of every venture, at the inception of every new idea, Lucia Chase bursts with a remarkable, pulsating enthusiasm. Then, after a time, turning a deaf ear to the voice of experience, and discovering to her astonishment that things have not worked out as she expected, she sulks, tosses all ideas of policy aside, and then turns impatiently and impulsively to something that is in the way of a new adventure. Off she goes on a new tack. Eagerly and rashly she grasps frantically at the next idea or suggestion forthcoming from any one who is, at that moment, in favor. So, she thinks, this time I have got it!... The pattern repeats itself endlessly and expensively. It started thus, with her financing of the Mordkin Ballet, before the days of Ballet Theatre. With the Mordkin Ballet, aside from financing it, she danced; danced the roles of only the greatest _ballerinas_. This pleasure she had. So far as operating a ballet company is concerned, she still leaps about without a policy, and each time the result seems unhappily to follow the same disappointing pattern.