Christine weds Stuart Knight only to discover he prefers the high life to married life. When Dr. Alan Monteagle comes along, Christine is drawn to him. But, still determined to stick to her wedding vows, she runs from him, only to get in a car accident with her husband, who happened to be riding by with one of his floozies.

When his son marries a woman whose mother is the madame of a brothel, a wealthy father in San Francisco disowns him. The newlyweds travel to the South Seas, where he gets a job on a plantation. The father sends an agent to the plantation to try to buy off his son's bride, but she won't go for it.

Tom Conlin, an Irish cop walking a beat in an Italian neighborhood, falls in love with Tita Sartori, the daughter of a florist. Tita returns Tom's affection but keeps him at a distance, believing him to be married; However she is also wooed by an unscrupulous politician of considerable wealth.....

After graduating from a fashionable finishing school and touring Europe with her father, Selina Peake returns to the United States, where her father is accidentally killed after losing his fortune in a gambling den. Selina is reduced to teaching in a high school in the Dutch community at High Prarie near Chicago. She boards in the farmhouse of Klass Poole, a dull-witted market gardener, and finally marries Pervus DeJong, a poor and backward farmer. She shares the drudgery of her husband's futile life and finds happiness only in their small son, Dirk, whom she calls "So-Big."

A story of a woman who committed a murder. In a French court room her life is retold by long flashbacks of her testimony and life.

A young mother, Mildred, doesn't know that her husband Walter is cheating on her. One night she attends a party with a friend of her husband's, and the man gets drunk and begins groping her when they get home. Her husband sees this and uses it as an excuse to sue his wife for divorce. In the ensuing trial he wins, due to fraudulent evidence, and gets custody of the child. Complications ensue.

Bank clerk Vincent Forrest loses his savings in a gambling den run by Madame Zoe and her provider, Van Merton. Forrest's wife Ann begins an affair with Merton when she discovers that Forrest is infatuated with Madame Zoe. Ann loses heavily gambling, but Vincent soon realizes what is happening in time to save his wife and to restore her happiness.

Robert, a young steelworker, lives with his family and George, a good friend who has invented a new method of refining steel and promises Robert that they will split the proceeds if they sell the process to their employer. Robert goes to the company's board of directors and receives what he considers to be a good offer, but his wife June doesn't think it's enough. She talks to the board and persuades them to make George the company president. Now that he's rich, Robert becomes convinced that his wife is having an affair with George, and he embarks on his own affair with a sophisticated, attractive--and ambitious--woman.

Tony is sentenced to be hanged for the murder of his friend, Pietro, whom he found seducing his bride, Felipa, and she is sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment as an accessory. Born in prison, her child is taken from her at the age of three and is adopted by the judge, now governor, who sentenced the parents.