How Women Love

Rosa Roma’s voice is caged gold, sealed behind a contract that forbids her name, her heart, her reflection in any shop-window. Ogden Ward, patron-as-panopticon, trades applause for anonymity, demanding she become a disembodied aria echoing through gramophone horns. Enter Griffith Ames, composer of tidal chromaticism, who hears not a commodity but a comet; together they forge an opera that detonates the proscenium and, worse, the clause that would keep her chaste from life. Ward retaliates with the cold arithmetic of ownership: a ruby collar once looted from a Burmese temple, now the talismanic ransom for her breach. The stones disappear, Ames is shackled by suspicion, and Rosa must decide whether art is worth the scaffold. In the final reel the true thief—Ward’s own factotum—spills guilt like wine across white marble, returning both rubies and reputation, while Rosa reclaims her timbre and her beloved on a stage no longer rented but sovereign.