Loutish Teddy Brant feeling trapped by his marriage and family commitments to the sweet Rose and their infant daughter Helen fakes his suicide and embarks on a dissolute life.
Two sisters, Julia Crossland and Evelyn Jefferson, happy lives are thrown into turmoil when a man from their past, Thomas Chadwick reappears unexpectedly.
Nekhludoff, a Russian nobleman serving on a jury, discovers that the young girl on trial, Katusha, is someone he once seduced and abandoned and that he himself bears responsibility for reducing her to crime.
Ellinor, who was unofficially adopted as an orphan by 'Old Peter,' who maintained a lighthouse on a virtually deserted beach, has grown up wild and nearly silent.
A woman writes about her sister's tragedy, vowing to help others in similar situations: Because Bettina longs to leave her country home, her loving mother sends her and her serious-minded elder sister to London, accepting their aunt's invitation to visit and allow Bettina to be introduced to society.
Conchita Cordova sings in the cathedral choir in her village of San Miguelito near the Rio Grande. Millionaire oil man John Rannie, whose oil fields have displaced the peasants, desires Conchita, and when he learns that her fiance, Juan Mendoza, has been employed by Adolf Wylie, a German spy, Rannie threatens to expose Juan unless Conchita gives herself to him.
When Bob Stratton returns from war in France, he soon discovers his ranch in the hands of a pretty girl, Mary Thorne, who explains that upon her father's death she became the sole owner.
Horace Ventimore, a young London architect, stumbles across an old brass bottle. When he picks it up a genie suddenly appears and promises Horace that he will grant every wish Horace wants in exchange for his freedom.
Three men fall in love with a woman from a window photograph. When they find her living as a recluse in an isolated Hungarian mansion, they decide against a visit because she wouldn't live up to their idealized images of her.
Automobile maker John Kent is an old-fashioned sort who refuses to advertise his car line. His daughter Ginger, however, is determined to get him some publicity and goes speeding around town in one of his cars, hoping to get arrested.