Jack Standish feels responsible for the failure of the partnership with his father and goes to the South Seas where he falls prey to alcohol, is seduced by Lullaby Lou, a vamp, and tricked by a brutal plantation owner, Gordon Van Brock.

Thrifty orphan Norah MacPherson meets wealthy young James Patterson, who gets her a job as a chorus girl. They fall in love. To put up a good front, she spends all her money on clothes. Patterson doubts her when he sees her wearing a string of fake pearls; he then finds that she hasn't been unfaithful, and they are reconciled.

A young woman borrows money from her boss for her wedding dress. After the marriage he asks to be repaid, and she--not liking to ask her husband for money--writes a check on her husband's account. When he discovers that his wife has written a check to another man and not told him, complications ensue.

A woman abandons her husband and baby to look for a better life in the big city. Years later, as an elderly woman, she finds her son living in the big city and tries to make amends by moving in with him without revealing her secret identity.

Hajj, a rascally beggar on the periphery of the court of Baghdad, schemes to marry his daughter to royalty and to win the heart of the queen of the castle himself.

Bob Gilmore, a young clubman, is called by telephone to his home, where his parents are giving him a birthday party. He overhears one of the men guests make a slurring remark about his mother's appearance, and proceeds to punish him then and there, throwing the entire gathering into an uproar. Later in the evening he assumes guilt for a check which had been in reality forged by his foster father, in order to save the mother's feelings, but obtains a written confession from the guilty man for future use if necessary. Learning that he had been adopted from a foundling asylum in infancy, Bob decides to go to New York to see if he cannot learn his real name, which he understands begins with "Mor."

Ezra Scroggs is a shiftless gambler who has let his hotel, the Lakeview, fall on hard times. Finally his daughter Nancy gets fed up seeing all the business go to his rival, Si Whittaker at the Majestic, and she decides to do something about it.

Christine, known as Tiny, whose mother eloped with a circus clown and became a parachutist, spends most of her time with her lame dog and an elephant.

Just prior to World War I, the Kaiser sends Baron von Zeller to inform Emperor Franz Josef of Austria that he is ready to declare war on France. Sensing the impending crisis, the French War Office dispatches secret agent René de Bornay to investigate the situation, and upon his arrival, he cultivates the friendship of Franz Josef's mistress, the Countess Griselda von Arenburg.