Ellen Llewellyn is a chorus girl who is loved by orchestra leader Andy Owens, a genuinely nice guy. When Ellen meets the aristocratic Tony Winterslip, she's impressed by his family tree and vast wealth. When Winterslip's car breaks down during a rainstorm, Ellen gets drenched and contracts pneumonia. It takes much persuasion, but finally Ellen agrees to recuperate at the Winterslip country home.

Badger, a clerk at a Wall Street brokerage, discovers that his boss Gideon Bloodgood has swindled an investor, Fairweather, out of his money. Fairweather dies of a heart attack after an argument with Bloodgood, and Badger uses this knowledge to blackmail him. By a strange coincidence, Bloodgood's daughter Lucy runs over Fairweather's son, Paul, and cripples him.

Robert Frazer and Anna Q. Nilsson star in this drama, based on Temple Dusk by Calvin Johnson. David Marlowe (Frazer), the son of a clergyman (Frank Currier), is seduced by the earthly delights of drinking and gambling. While intoxicated he proposes to Ember Edwards (Nilsson), and she accepts because he has told her he is rich and she is sick of her poverty-stricken life. At a gambling house run by Clement Palter (Charles Lane), David takes a 25 dollar check from Bunny Fish (Robert Schable), changes the amount to 2,500 dollars, and proceeds to lose the whole sum at faro.

Wealthy Clytie Rogers writes a novel in which a society girl commits a burglary, but it is "roasted" by critic Jimmy Gilpin, who writes that her story is completely implausible. To prove him wrong, Clytie decides to feign a robbery and enters an apartment through an open window. She is apprehended by a policeman, who mistakes her for local robber "Powder Nose Annie." Gilpin sees her in jail and, posing as crook Jimmy of the Dives, arranges to break her out and take her on a robbing spree. Finally, Jimmy returns her to her parents and then calls at her home as Gilpin, the critic. Clytie is suprised but forgives the deception and agrees to marry him.

A story of the First World War, told in semi-documentary style, focusing on the iniquities of the German war machine, and with its dramatic center the sinking by a German U-boat of the passenger liner Lusitania in 1915.

The disgrace and suicide of her father drives Eleanore Marston from her comfortable existence into a life as a department store clerk in New York. There she meets wealthy Powers Fiske, who offers her a life of luxury if she will consent to an operation on her brain which would deprive her of her memory.

Theda Bara's vamping is at its most evil here. She plays the Russian Princess Petrovitch, who loves only her pearls. Her husband, the Prince (E.F. Roseman), sells state secrets to a spy to pay her exorbitant bills, and her response is to report him to the secret police. Then she runs off to Monte Carlo with her lover, Count Zerstoff (Emil deVarney), but she poisons him after he racks up a load of gambling losses.

A lonely wife runs off with a traveling actor, taking her boy with her but leaving her daughter behind. The boy, Byron Bennett, grows up, and is stranded back in Mayville with a theater troupe. To make enough money to get out of town, they teach the local fire department how to put on a play. While the village cutie Grace Jessup is being shown how to act, one of the troupe tries to seduce her. Byron, knowing what the lecher is up to, even if Grace doesn't, follows the pair and chokes the man senseless.

Cyril Hamilton is a chicken-hearted easterner who heads west. He makes up for his past misdeeds by rescuing a Cavalry colonel's daughter Marcia West from Mexican bandidos.

Upon striking oil on his farm, Silas T. Pettingill (Charles Eldridge) moves to Park Avenue at the behest of his social-climbing wife Maria (Kate Blancke) and daughter Helen (Emmy Wehlen). But like Jiggs in the comic strip, Pettingill never loses his common touch, and one evening he goes out on a toot with his new chauffeur Hubert Stanwood (Paul Gordon).

The plot is a loose autobiographical interpretation of the life of Vernon and Irene Castle, interspersed among a typical melodrama of the period