During the American tours of Sadler’s Wells, she is almost invariably greeted with flowers at the station. She seems to have friends in every city. How she manages to do this, I am not sure; but I feel it must be a tribute to her genuine warmth and friendliness. _VIOLETTA ELVIN_ Violetta Elvin, another of the talented _ballerinas_ of the “fabulous” Sadler’s Wells company, is in the direct line of Russian ballet, for she is a product of the contemporary ballet of Russia. The daughter of a pioneer of Russian aviation, Vassili Prokhoroff, and his wife, Irina Grimousinkaya, a Polish artist and an early experimenter with action photography, Violetta Prokhorova became a pupil at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, at the age of nine. It is interesting to note that she was one of a class of fifty accepted out of five hundred applicants; it is still more interesting, and an example of the rigorous Russian training, that, when she finished the course nine years later, out of the original fifty there were only nine left: three girls and six boys. Of the three girls, Prokhorova was the only one who attained ballet’s coveted rank of _etoile_. Violetta finished her training at the time Moscow was being evacuated against the Nazi invasion, and was sent on a three-thousand mile journey to be a _ballerina_ at the ballet at Tashkent, Russian Turkestan. Here, at the age of eighteen, she danced the leading roles in two works, _The Fountain of Bakchissarai_, based on Pushkin’s famous poem, and _Don Quixote_, the Minkus work of which contemporary American balletgoers know only the famous _pas de deux_, but which I presented in America, during the season 1925-1926, staged by Laurent Novikoff, with settings and costumes by the great Russian painter, Korovin. Another point of interest about Elvin is that she was never a member of the _corps de ballet_, for she was transferred from Tashkent to the Bolshoi Ballet, which had been moved, for safety reasons, to Kuibyshev, some five hundred miles from Moscow. In the early autumn of 1943, when the Nazi horde had been driven back in defeat, the Ballet returned to the Bolshoi, and Prokhorova danced important roles there. It was in Moscow, in 1945, that Violetta Prokhorova married Harold Elvin, an architect associated with the British Embassy, and came with him to London. On her arrival in London she became a member of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, first as a soloist, and later as _ballerina_. My own impressions are of a vibrant personality and a great beauty. Her feet are extraordinarily beautiful, and, if I am any judge of the female figure, I would say her body approximates the perfect classical proportions. In her dancing, her Russian training is at all times evident, for there is a charm of manner, a broad lyricism, coupled with a splendid poise that are not the common heritage of all western dancers.