When his son marries a woman whose mother is the madame of a brothel, a wealthy father in San Francisco disowns him. The newlyweds travel to the South Seas, where he gets a job on a plantation. The father sends an agent to the plantation to try to buy off his son's bride, but she won't go for it.
After graduating from a fashionable finishing school and touring Europe with her father, Selina Peake returns to the United States, where her father is accidentally killed after losing his fortune in a gambling den. Selina is reduced to teaching in a high school in the Dutch community at High Prarie near Chicago. She boards in the farmhouse of Klass Poole, a dull-witted market gardener, and finally marries Pervus DeJong, a poor and backward farmer. She shares the drudgery of her husband's futile life and finds happiness only in their small son, Dirk, whom she calls "So-Big."
Christine weds Stuart Knight only to discover he prefers the high life to married life. When Dr. Alan Monteagle comes along, Christine is drawn to him. But, still determined to stick to her wedding vows, she runs from him, only to get in a car accident with her husband, who happened to be riding by with one of his floozies.
A young mother, Mildred, doesn't know that her husband Walter is cheating on her. One night she attends a party with a friend of her husband's, and the man gets drunk and begins groping her when they get home. Her husband sees this and uses it as an excuse to sue his wife for divorce. In the ensuing trial he wins, due to fraudulent evidence, and gets custody of the child. Complications ensue.