Returning to the village of Bayport after twenty-two years, retired sea captain Cyrus Whittaker finds the community under the power of political boss Herman Atkins. Cy opposes Atkin's choice for the position of teacher and helps to elect Miss Daws instead, thus earning the enmity of the politician. One day, a young girl named Emily Thomas arrives with a note from Sarah Oliver, a relative of Cy, explaining that the girl is the daughter of his old sweetheart and that her father is in jail and her mother dead.

Mrs. Penfield, better known as Penzie, is one of the inhabitants of a tenement neighborhood known as "the Custard Cup" because of its oval shape. Penzie is a widow who lost both her husband and son in the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919. She has found fulfillment by taking in three orphans. One of the Custard Cup's other residents is a counterfeiter, and when the police are too hot on his trail, he leaves a package with Penzie and sets a boat aflame when he tries to destroy some phony bills. When the gang is rounded up, Penzie -- who has been looking for one of her adopted children -- is found at the hideout and arrested.

The Drews are considering new scripts when they decide to produce Pay-Day, the melodramatic story of the wealthy and sinister Kirke Brentwood and his lower-class wife, Doris Fenton.

A string of valuable pearls provides the motivation for the murder of Wareing, a widowed banker, who intended them for his daughter, Mary. She is comforted by Barton, a criminologist and friend of her late father, who appears to have left his financial affairs in a terrible state. Meanwhile, Mary's fiancé works diligently to identify the murderer. Although the criminologist places the blame on Wareing's butler, a reformed burglar, the killer is finally revealed to be Barton himself.

Young Kitty runs away from home to avoid marrying a man she doesn't love. Her car breaks down on a country road and she meets Robert, a young artist who has just been turned down by a woman he loved madly and is about to commit suicide by lying on the railroad tracks.