The "girl" of the title was played by Hazel Dawn, a popular stage actress who briefly enjoyed a flourishing film career. Dawn plays Miss Shipley, an American girl vacationing in France. Our heroine finds herself the romantic bone of contention between two "men of the world" (William Roselle and Hal Clarendon), who end up fighting a duel over her affections.

Several young couples have gathered at a vacation home in the mountains. The group of friends go climbing, but Phyllis Ashbrook and John Manning leave the others behind. They get lost and have to spend the night in a cabin. When they are brought back the next day, appearances compel them to marry, even though they are already engaged to others.

Elinor Shale's happiness at being engaged to Gerald Forster is interrupted by the arrival of her sister Lucy, who confesses that she will soon give birth to an illegitimate child. Elinor goes into seclusion with her sister until the baby is born and then tries to find a foster mother. Seeking to estrange Gerald from Elinor so that she may marry him herself, Lucy convinces him that Elinor is the child's mother. After Lucy and Gerald's marriage, Elinor learns of her sister's perfidy and resolves to tell Gerald the truth, but at the sight of their happiness, she relents and returns home.

A beautiful young French girl falls in love with a handsome New Englander, but when they marry and return to his family home, she finds that she does not fit in at all.

In order to secretly replenish the family's failing fortunes, Virginia Griswold secures a position in the Secret Service to apprehend a group of counterfeiters and gain the reward money.

Julie le Breton is the illegitimate daughter of Lady Rose, whose own background resembles that of her daughter. Julie is buffeted by the ill treatment of her mother's family and nearly ruined by a fortune hunter, but her own resources and goodness stand her in good stead.

A notorious gambler and card cheat, George Forrester, rules a little western town with an iron hand. The men of the town plot to catch him cheating and do, but his men save him from danger. In the same town lives Gerald Austen, or Aitkens, who had left his tyrannical father in the east and made good in the west.

Sheila Cardross Malcourt shares only a loveless marriage with Louis Malcourt, but is unwilling to divorce him even to marry the man she really loves, for fear of hurting her foster parents. Instead, she stifles her feelings for Garry Hamil and strives to maintain her marriage. But when tragedy ensues, she finds herself faced with a new dilemma.

Convent raised Doris Elliott moves to New York to live with her brother Richard not knowing that he is part of a drug trafficking ring controlled by unscrupulous ward boss Michael O'Leary. At first Doris remains ignorant of the pervasiveness of crime and corruption in the Lower East Side until her friend, Mamie Bronson, whose brother, "Dopey Benny," has fallen victim to drugs, confesses that O'Leary has raped her. When O'Leary breaks into their home and attempts to rape her as well, he is shot when Richard unexpectedly arrives. Finding O'Leary dead and Richard unconscious, the police arrest Doris, and she is tried for murder. Defense lawyer Thomas McDonald, who has been working to expose the politician, is losing his case when Dopey Benny testifies that he killed O'Leary to avenge his sister's assault. Acquitted Doris is now free to marry Thomas.

When a girl's lover kills her husband she offers herself to her father-in-law in exchange for his freedom.