The Turning Point

When her drunken father dies from falling downstairs on the night of her engagement announcement, Helen Winthrop finds a note from him warning that drinking has ruined the family's past four generations. She breaks her engagement to lawyer Robert Craig so that she can test herself as she fears that her children might inherit the habit. After sacrificing her reputation to save that of her adulterous married friend Stella Scarr, Helen goes to a resort hotel where she wins a tennis tournament and flirts with Percy Farwell, the son of social climber Mrs. Honorah Farwell. In order to break up her son's romance with a supposedly disgraced woman, Mrs. Farwell hires Robert Craig.

Judge Gray, who is running for governor, is supported by Theodore Van Ness, Sr., prominent newspaper publisher, with the understanding that he has a clean record. His opponent, Bob Masters, is attorney for Mrs. Gray in securing a "framed" divorce from the judge on the grounds of desertion and mental cruelty. The judge's daughter, Mary, meets Theodore, Jr., and falls in love with him, though he is unaware of her identity until his father threatens, at the behest of Masters, to publish the story of Gray's divorce.

Mary Grant has a gambling father and a mother who has disappeared. Even though she has been raised in a convent she proves true to her ancestry by running away to Monte Carlo and spending her small inheritance at the gambling table.

A shop girl has ambitions of marrying up.