There is, at once, quite a change in Dot and her sweetheart Robert plainly doesn't like it. After a tussle with a burglar and a cop the couple come to an understanding.
Young Jackie Kernwood, the daughter of the colonel commanding an army post, is bored with the routines of post life, and to break the monotony she organizes a girls' brigade, of which her father disapproves.
Against the backdrop of New York City of the early 1850s, a young woman -- naively seeking to win the love she reads about in the romance novels she devours -- finds one prospect in an earnest denizen of the Bowery, and another in an elegant young aristocrat.
The Talbots, formerly one of the Eastern Shore's first families, have gone to seed: Pap is a drunk, soddenly decaying in his ruined ancestral home, and three of his sons (William, Carol, and Ezra) are lazy, shiftless young men.
Patricia O'Rourke, a good-natured prankster who works as a copy girl for the Sentinel , angers her co-worker Stubbs and is about to lose her job when the managing editor offers her one more chance.
Trying to win the Three C's railroad line for his home town of Topaz, Colorado, Nicholas "Nick" Tarvin journeys to India to secure the famed jewel known as the Naulahka, which he plans to present to Mrs.
In order to help her poverty-stricken family, Jonnie Consadine, a strong-willed young woman from the Blue Ridge Mountains, comes to the city and takes a job in a mill, while her uncle, Pros Passmore, continues his endless search for a lost silver mine.
Unrequited love rules the day as both wealthy Judith Sylvester and her invalid aunt pine for men who got away, but happiness lays ahead for one while hopeful dreams sustain the other.
During World War I, Jane Whiting, a bright young lawyer who is engaged to Senator Wheeler, is assigned by the district attorney to expose a gang of spies who are collecting money for the German government through the operation of a fraudulent charity organization.
Hero Henry Court (Herbert Rawlinson) is very much his parents' child, having inherited the predominant character traits of both his go-getting father and his shy, retiring mother.
Ellen Shannon, the daughter of self-made Irish politician Pat Shannon, is engaged to Ted Breslin, but because Pat began his career as a menial laborer, Ted's mother, Mrs.