In Chicago

The Miracle. Chicago had its longest coattails pressed, its tallest collars starched. It bought new gowns. It ordered orchids and gardenias. It swept down blustery Michigan Avenue to the Auditorium, entered a cathedral and was struck with awe and wonderment. It found that Karl Volloemer's great pantomime, as presented by Messrs. Comstock and Gest, staged by Max Reinhardt and acted by Lady Diana Manners, Iris Tree and Chicago's own Elinor Patterson, was everything that London and Manhattan had said it was.

Folk who went night after night fell to comparing the performances of the three actresses who appeared in turn as the nun. They thought that Miss Patterson and Lady Diana brought the greatest spirituality to the part, that Miss Tree had not quite their ethereal innocence together with the sense of warm, alert youth that is required. Miss Patterson, like her debutante predecessor, Miss Rosamond Pinchot of Manhattan, enjoyed a special triumph; and the story went the rounds again of how she had made her social debut last year on condition that her parents let her become an actress another year.

The Dumb Show. In the great dark vault of a cathedral on the Rhine stands a wonder-working image of the Virgin. A thousand candle flames flicker, their brilliance reflected in the gorgeous windows, in the golden vessels of the holy service. Worshippers come in throngs to pray, pale-faced nuns do their devotions and priests perform the sacred ritual under a mantle of incense and church music.

In these holy precincts is a nun. The way of the spirit is no longer attractive to her and she sets her feet in the ways of the world, shedding her sacred garments and going forth with a gay knight. Then does the Blessed Virgin descend from her high place, don the robes of the nun and take the nun's place in the convent. Then the people weep and cry out, for their sacred image has been lost.

For the nun the way of the world is stony and studded with thorns as well as gold. She attends a vast banquet in the Hall of a count's castle, she becomes the bride of an emperor. And at last she faces death and revolution (black and red) and the winter night, cold and miserable.

Anon the way of the Spirit seems wondrous sweet to her and she returns to the cathedral, and the Virgin, who has all these years played the part of a model nun, casts off the nun's garments and again becomes a sacred image. As she does so she takes into her arms the child which the nun has brought back, the child which dies as she returns to the way of the spirit.

The joyful people crowd to worship their holy image which has returned. The nuns and priests renew their high devotions and the voices of little children are raised in Christmas hymns.

The only audible accompaniment to the presentation of this story in which 900 actors take part are the hymns of the devout, the cries of the mob and the solemn swelling of religious music from the throbbing pipes of the organ.

Lady Diana. Chicagoans marveled at the beauty of Lady Diana Olivia Winifred Maud Manners Duff-Cooper, understood why Britain pets and serves her as its fairest daughter. A slip of a woman in her early thirties, colored in delicate pastel, she sustains the fame of the women of her late father's house of Rutland. In the 18th Century, Mary Isabella, "the beautiful duchess," sat four times to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, whom Lady Diana is said to resemble most and whose device and motto she uses (a peacock rampant, subscribed Pour y parvenir), bobbed her hair and eloped with Sir John Manners 400 years ago, making a speech to her relatives which Diana paraphrased in 1919 after finding and nursing Captain Alfred Duff-Cooper in a Red Cross station in France: "But I love the man, and I shall have none other. I'll never wear the cap of St. Catherine, because old maids are only found in museum cases." Lady Diana made her own wedding dress "But I want to make my own dresses" and wore a veil worn by six generations of Rutland brides.

In 1921 Lady Diana edited Femina, a sheetlet with which admirers said she made and unmade fashions and politicians. The year before she had won Queen Mary's consent to her entering the "flickers" (cinema). A husband was by no means a whole career for her. She talked of self-expression, said the cinema was "the most real form of romance modern life expresses." When invited to play the Madonna, which she alternates with the Nun in The Miracle, she "felt almost as though I had a vocation to act the part."

Visitors in London have seen her in gay night clubs, where she is toasted as Mayfair's wit and called the original of Michael Arlen's green-hatted lady. Visitors last winter in the Bahamas saw her parade the beach in pink bathing pajamas, and one night dance in the sand around a palm-shadowed driftwood blaze, a barefooted nymph of the tropics. Madonna, nun, nymph, notable, she is first and foremost a young lady in love with life.