G. Marion Burton

Anne Cabell, working as a dancer at a nightclub goes to confront a man who is blackmailing her friend with incriminating letters. When he is killed, she comes under suspicion of murder. However it turns out that he was a foreign spy, and she had nothing to do with his slaying.

When Alice Winton's brother embezzles funds belonging to his employer, Benjamin Graves, a promoter of worthless mining stock, she saves him from arrest by signing over to Graves a hefty promissory note. Later Graves deliberately wrecks the mining company in which Alice's invalid father has invested his money, and the shock from the resulting bankruptcy, kills him. Alice marries Robert Burton, a noted criminologist who believes in the theory, "once a thief, always a thief," and the couple takes up temporary residence with District Attorney Jeffrey Miller. In Miller's safe are incriminating documents concerning Graves's illegal activities, and Graves, knowing of their existence, blackmails Alice into stealing them by showing her some compromising love letters to which he has forged her name.

Robert Ardis, a small-town youth studying for the ministry, encounters a visiting Gypsy, Marcheta, and is displeased by her pagan conduct. When she saves the life of his younger brother, however, Robert becomes fascinated with her. Though scorning his religion, Marcheta saves his life during a storm by praying for a miracle, and in rescuing him she comes to believe in God.

To receive the $5,000 promised in her Uncle Stephen's will, Dulcie Culpepper must live with her Uncle John in New York for six months so that her father, a Confederate colonel, will be reconciled with his brother whose marriage to a Northern woman long ago caused a breach.

Mary Boyne, who made shirts at four dollars a week, had no place for love in her life - only despair and hate for the son of the man who had plunged her family into deepest distress. Peter Kenwitz loved Mary, but because he was a mathematician and a pessimist by trade, his love was as hopeless as her chance for happiness.

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.

As a derelict paints the face of a girl on a barroom floor, the plot is developed in a series of flashbacks: Robert Stevens, an artist engaged to marry Marion, a society girl, becomes charmed with a fisherman's daughter who poses for him. The society girl's brother brings dishonor upon the fisherman's daughter, and when she commits suicide the artist shields the brother. Stevens is blamed by his fiancée, who terminates their engagement. The artist becomes a derelict and is wrongfully imprisoned. Eventually Stevens is exonerated and reunited with Marion.

Forced to wear quaint short dresses and pigtails so that she will inspire her grandfather's sentimental poetry, nineteen-year-old Joy Havenith longs for companions of her own age.