For a number of reasons, the Fokines decided to make New York their home. They eventually bought a large house, where Riverside Drive joins Seventy-second Street; converted part of the house into a dancing studio, and lived in the rest of the house in an atmosphere of nostalgic gloom, a sort of Chopinesque twilight. Ballet in America was at a very low ebb when Fokine settled here. There was a magnificent opportunity to hand for the father of modern ballet, had he but taken it. For some reason he muffed the big chance. Perhaps he was embittered by a series of unhappy experiences, not the least of which was the changed political scene in his beloved Russia, to which he was never, during the rest of his life, able to make adjustment. He was content, as an artist, for the most part to rest on his considerable laurels. There was always _Schéhérazade_. More importantly, there was always _Sylphides_. Fokine’s creative life, in the true sense, was something he left behind in Europe. He never seemed to sense or to try to understand the American impulse, rhythm, or those things which lie at the root of our native culture. In the bleak Riverside Drive mansion, he taught rather half-heartedly at classes, but gave much of his time and energy in well-paid private lessons to the untalented daughters of the rich. From the choreographic point of view, he was satisfied, for the most part, to reproduce his early masterpieces with inferior organizations, or to stage lesser pieces for the Hippodrome or the Ziegfeld Follies. One of the latter will suffice as an example. It was called _Frolicking Gods_, a whimsy about a couple of statues of Greek Gods who came to life, became frightened at a noise, and returned to their marble immobility. And it may be of interest to note that these goings-on were all accomplished to, of all things, Tchaikowsky’s _Nutcracker Suite_. There was also a pseudo-Aztec affair, devised, so far as tale was concerned, by Vera Fokine, and called _The Thunder Bird_. The Aztec quality was emphasized by the use of a pastiche of music culled from the assorted works of Tchaikowsky, Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Balakirev, and Borodine. It was during the winter of 1920, not long after the Fokines, with their son Vitale, had arrived here, that we came together professionally. I arranged to present them jointly in a series of programmes at the Metropolitan Opera House, with Arnold Volpe and his Symphony Orchestra.