Jane Morgan, to avoid marrying family lawyer Richard Van Loytor, takes her maid, Murray, and leaves home to make her own career. Finding it difficult to get work, she decides she is most accomplished as a "match-breaker" and offers her services in that capacity.

In a Virginia resort town in August 1918, Christopher Brent is viewed as a slacker because he refuses to enlist. Secretly, Christopher is observing German spies who are passing information about coastal fortifications for invasion preparations. Seeing Christopher consort with Mrs. Miriam Lee, also from the secret service, his fiancee Molly Preston, who had been bothered by the talk about him, becomes jealous. When Molly's brother Norman discovers a German code book in Mrs. Lee's possession, Christopher, who obtained the book when he destroyed the wireless of the chief spy, Carl Sanderson, who also loves Molly, is suspected of aiding the Germans.

After living in a boarding school for some years, Peggy Dean accepts the invitation of her Aunts Abigail and Salina to live with them. They warn her that she will be "on probation" because of the family's displeasure with Peggy's father for marrying an actress, so Peggy masquerades as an exceedingly prim and proper missionary.

A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage and set to an original symphonic score.