When retired New England skipper Captain Purcell finds Kit as a baby in a storm, he adopts the child, who grows up to be an adventurous youngster of the docks.

In their small village, Romanian peasant girl Katinka Veche falls in love with the studious Jan Drakachu. Jan wins a scholarship to an American university eventually becoming a successful engineer. Unbeknownst to him, Katinka, whom he had to leave behind in the village, is sold into slavery by her cruel, dissolute father. Her owner, Victor Dravich, beats her into submission forcing her to become his mistress in his Syrian gambling den. When the house is raided, Dravich takes her on his travels around the world until they finally settle in a small Arizona mining camp. Broken, she sees Jan but is too ashamed to speak to him sending instead for her old tutor Boris. Upon arrival Boris kills Dravich but is shot by the sheriff. Katinka, now free, follows Jan to New York. After further travail the pair are finally reunited.

Convent-reared Aline Ann Belame receives a letter from her grandfather General Belame, whom she had never previously met. The letter summons Aline to the old man's plantation to meet the husband he has chosen for her. Elated at the prospect of having a home and a husband, Aline arrives at the plantation only to learn that her fiancé, Monsieur Cayetane, is a withered old man. Aline refuses the match and soon falls in love with Burton Striker, who is installing a vault door on the General's wine cellar.

Patricia Parker, on the advice of her father, leaves her life as a chorus girl for the bucolic surroundings of Silas Wainwright, an old friend of her father's.