Nineteen-year-old Julio heads to Lisbon from the provinces and gets a job as a shoemaker for his uncle Raul. But when he meets Ilda, a confident young housemaid who becomes a regular shop visitor, his working-class values collide with the bourgeois trappings of modern life.

After a fatal crash involving her brother, Elsa tries to escape her corrupt & prejudiced background, making Francisco (the victim’s dad) – a wealthy family’s driver – resign himself with the unavoidable so as not to compromise his employer’s son, thus trying to gain something from the tragedy.

The vicissitudes of a bourgeois family and the conflicts emerged between brothers - Dr. Manuel Bernardo, wise and weighted, and Zecas, libertine and Capricious - who ignore his kinship. Two girls mark the sentimental vector: one defends the danger that threatens the threat, the other does not know how to react and is the victim of her ingenuity, a dream of restless youth ...

Eduardo, the son of the wealthy farmer Jerónimo de Vinhais, falls in love and departs for Lisbon with the fado singer Maria da Graça, after studying abroad, and refusing his father "too" to be a taurenic knight.

Passion and ambition interplay to bring dissention and tragedy into the home of an old fisherman married to a much younger woman.