Often in America and London we have gone out to dine, to sup, often with a group. “Sasha” invariably would be the first to ask the headwaiter or _maître d’hôtel_ for a copy of the menu. Immediately he would concentrate on it, poring over it, giving it seemingly careful scrutiny and study. All the others in the party would have ordered, and then, after long cogitation, “Sasha” would summon the waiter and, pointing to something in the menu utterly irrelevant, would solemnly demand: “Ham and eggs.” I am happy to count “Sasha” Volinine among my old friends, and it is always a pleasure to foregather with him when I am in Paris. _ADOLPH BOLM_ If my old friend, Adolph Bolm, were here to read this, he probably would be the first to object to being classified with this quartet of “Imperialists.” He would have pointed out to me in his emphatic manner that by far the greater part of his career had been spent in the United States, working for ballet in America. He would have insisted that he neither thought nor acted like an “Imperialist”: that he was a progressive, not a reactionary; and he would, at considerable length, have advanced his theory that all “Imperialists” were reactionaries. He would have repeated to me that even when he was at the Maryinsky, he was a rebel and a leader in the revolt against what he felt were the stultifying influences of its inbred conservatism. This would have gone on for some time, for Bolm was intelligent, literate, articulate, and ready to make a speech at the drop of a ballet shoe, or no shoe at all. I have placed Bolm in this book among the “Imperialists” because he had his roots in the Imperial Russian Ballet, where he was conditioned as child and youth; he was a product of the School in Theatre Street and a Maryinsky soloist for seven years; he was a contemporary and one-time colleague of the three other members of this quartet, either in Russia or with the Diaghileff Ballet Russe. Born in St. Petersburg in 1884, the son of the concert-master and associate conductor of the French operatic theatre, the Mikhailovsky, Bolm entered the School at ten, was a first-prize graduate in 1904. He was never a great classical dancer; but he had a first-rate sense of the theatre, was a brilliant character dancer, a superlative mime.