Summary
Rose Stanton—statuesque, velvet-voiced, and stifled—steps from the altar into a gilded cage: a marble Boston mansion where her new husband, Rodney Aldrich, worships precedent and distrusts her pulse. She reads Blackstone by lamplight while he counts billable hours; she dreams of jurisprudential fireworks, he dreams of decorative silence. One winter dawn she slams shut the Commentaries, boards a southbound train, and reinvents herself in Manhattan’s electric dusk—first as a kaleidoscope of kicking legs in a rooftop revue, later as a couture sorceress who stitches sequined rebellion into every chorus girl’s hem. Her atelier becomes a salon where silk sings, investors swarm, and Broadway producers beg for costumes that breathe like skin. Yet the higher she climbs, the louder the echo of Rodney’s dismissive laughter. On the brink of signing a theatre empire deal, she confronts the paradox: acclaim magnifies her desirability rather than her mind. Enter Rodney, chastened, briefcase in hand, to offer not love rekindled but respect freshly minted. The curtain falls on Rose packing away ambition like tissue between gowns, choosing matrimonial détente over solitary sovereignty, leaving the audience to wonder whether the real adventure was ever out there or merely in the mirror she refused to hold steady.
Synopsis
Following her marriage to wealthy lawyer Rodney Aldrich, Rose Stanton realizes that he is uninterested in her intellect. She takes up law studies to help him in his work, and when he scoffs at the idea, she leaves him, determined to prove herself an equally-intelligent marriage partner. In New York, Rose becomes a chorus girl, then seizes the opportunity to design costumes for Broadway shows. Soon she opens a salon and is very successful, but realizes that whatever a man's interest in a woman's work, his deepest concern will be with her as a woman. As she is about to sign a Broadway contract, Rodney confesses his admiration and respect for her, and she agrees to return to the career of wife and mother.
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