are careful
to eat what is best for them, and not everything that may tickle the
palate yet raise a rumpus inside one and upset the whole system, and
make them cross and cranky and homely and bad actors generally.

Good food, pure air, plenty of water, internally and externally, the
right amount of sleep, not more than eight hours, and not less than
seven, proper exercise and practice--all of these are essential to
make good dancers--to make _you_ good dancers.

Come in to my office tonight after class. Weigh yourselves before you
come in. Then talk to me about yourself and get my diet list to take
home, please.

[Illustration: LINA BASQUETTE]

NED WAYBURN'S MODERN AMERICANIZED BALLET TECHNIQUE

[Illustration]

I have invented a method of teaching the ballet that eliminates the
long and tedious training formerly considered necessary, and fits the
pupil for a stage appearance in the briefest possible length of time.
That my method is a perfect success is evidenced in the best theatres
everywhere. I have taken amateurs who never did a ballet step in their
lives, put them in training by my personally devised method, and made
perfect solo dancers of them in a few months' time, secured them
engagements, and their fame as ballet dancers par excellence is today
world-wide. Elsewhere in this book I shall name several of these whom
you know best, and you will admit that I am right in what I have just
said when you peruse their names.

I am assuming that you are aware of the fact that in all foreign
countries the ballet student is taught for years before she is allowed
to attempt a public appearance or permitted to consider a professional
engagement. This ultra-conservative custom has been brought across the
water, and the idea has always held here in America that the four,
six, ten year apprenticeship was a necessity; that no dancer could
qualify for a professional appearance in a shorter period. It was
taken for granted that there was no short cut to this trade, and up to
the recent present there has been none. But our American girls who are
gifted with a talent for this superb form of graceful dancing will
not consent to devote the best years of their lives to unproductive
labor. The idea of signing away several years of their happy lives in
order to become entitled merely to a critical teacher's approval, and
all this time without compensation of a financial nature, does not
appeal to any, and least of all to