It was six years later that The Swan floated into my life. In 1916, Charles B. Dillingham, Broadway theatrical producer with a difference, was the director of the Hippodrome, the unforgettable Sixth Avenue institution. Dillingham was “different” for a number of reasons. He was a theatre man of vision; the Hippodrome, with its fantastic and colossal entertainments, if not his idea, was his triumph; he was perhaps the only Broadway manager who had been offered the post of business manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, an offer he refused, but he did accept a commission to make a complete survey of the Metropolitan’s business affairs. For years I had stood in awe of him. In 1916, Dillingham engaged Pavlova to appear at the Hippodrome, with her partner, Alexandre Volinine. Neither the auspices, the billing, nor the setting could, by any stretch of the imagination, be termed ideal. Dillingham’s Hippodrome bore the subtitle “The National Amusement Institution of America,” an appellation as grandiose as the building itself. The evening’s entertainment (plus daily matinees), of which The Swan’s appearance was a part, was billed as “The Big Show, the Mammoth Minstrels, and the Ice Ballet, The Merry Doll.” Every night I was there in my favorite place at the back of the house. I soon learned the time schedule. I could manage to miss the skaters, the jugglers, the “mammoth” minstrels, the acrobats, the jumbo elephants. I would arrive a few minutes before Pavlova’s entrance. I watched and worshipped from afar. I had never met her. “Who was I,” I asked myself, “to meet a divinity?” One night, as the falling curtain cut her off from my view, a hand fell on my shoulder. It was Dillingham, for whom my admiration remained but my awe of him had decreased, since, by this time, we were both managers. He looked at me with a little smile and said, “Come along, Sol. I’m going back to her dressing-room.” The long hoped for but never really expected moment had come. Long had I rehearsed the speech I should make when and if this moment ever arrived. Now the time was here and I was dumb. I could only look. The Swan extended her hand as Dillingham presented me. She smiled. I bent low over the world’s most expressive hand. At her suggestion the three of us went to supper in the Palisades Amusement Park outdoor restaurant, overlooking the Hudson and upper Manhattan. I shall have a few things to say about Pavlova, the artist, about Pavlova, the _ballerina_. Perhaps even more important is Pavlova, the woman, Pavlova, the human being. These qualities came tumbling forth at our first meeting. The impression was ineradicable. As she ate a prodigious steak, as she laughed and talked, here was a sure and certain indication of her insatiable love of life and its good things. One of her tragedies, as I happen to know, is that fullness of life and love were denied her.