J.B. Ball, a rich financier, gets fed up with his free-spending family. He takes his wife's just-bought (very expensive) sable coat and throws it out the window, it lands on poor hard-working girl Mary Smith. But it isn't so easy to just give away something so valuable, as he soon learns.

A 10-year-old's happy life is shattered when his parents are divorced.

Mary stands by Jack after the Depression of 1929 but considers divorce when he again becomes successful by 1935. Bill, who loves Mary, works at keeping them together.

A shy office worker becomes a hero when a fortune teller calls him another Napoleon.

Before the guests arrive for a party in her apartment, Agnes Lambert, a writer of unsalable fiction, starts revising one of her stories because she realizes that it lacks drama and emotion. Later, she begins a romance with Tom Leighton, but although Tom loves her, he is already engaged to Ruth Beresford, who was recently blinded in an explosion.