It was much later, during the course of the tour following the New York season, that I arrived at the “meaning” of Wigman’s dances, and that will be told in its proper place. After the tumult and the shouting had died that opening night at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre, I took Wigman to supper with some friends. As we left the theatre together, Wigman was still in her trance; but, as the food was served, she came out of it with glistening eyes and a rapid-fire sort of highly literate chatter, in the manner of one sliding back to earth from the upper world. The party over and Wigman back in her hotel, I sat up to await the press notices. They were splendid. No one dared describe her “meaning,” but all were agreed that here was a dynamic force in dance that drove home her “message.” The notice I awaited most eagerly was that of the _New York Times_. The first City Edition did not carry it, something which I attributed to the lateness of the final curtain. I waited for the Late City Edition. Still not a line about Wigman. I simply could not understand. For years I had struggled to have the dance treated with respect by the press. Through the Pavlova days I talked and tried to convert editors to a realization of its importance. Any readers who are interested have only to turn up the files of their local newspapers and read the “reviews” of the period of the Pavlova and Diaghileff companies to find that ballet, in most cases, was “covered” by disgruntled music critics, who had been assigned, in many cases obviously against their wills, to review. You would find that the average music critic either overtly disliked ballet and had said so, or else treated it flippantly. At the time of Wigman’s arrival in America, the ice had been broken, as I have said, by the appointment of John Martin at the head of a full-time dance department at the _New York Times_. Mary Watkins, eager, enthusiastic, informed, was fulfilling a like function on the _New York Herald-Tribune_. Thus dance criticism was on its way to becoming professional; and the men and women of knowledge and taste and discernment who criticize dance today, I cannot criticize. For I have respect for the professional.