Abandoned as an infant on a stranger’s doorstep by her faithless mother, Marcella, Dorothea is taken in by Tom & Sarah Wentworth who in time inherit a vast coal mine in Pennsylvania. Now a young woman “Dot” falls in love with veterinarian Dr. Grant Hunter but her social climbing mother frowns on the match. Sara has set her sights on the Marquis del Carnavacchi for her daughter unaware that he is both a mobster and the lover of her errant natural mother. By chance Dot’s real father, Jim Gregory, also resides in the town and as tensions rise, he and Marcella join to save Dot from both harm and marriage to the wrong man.
George Crosby, a New York lawyer, with a passion for painting, wearied of his legal duties, sails for Brittany, where he meets Renée Kerouac, a fisher-maiden, and sketches her as a Corregan, a fairy who destroys the men who refuse her love. Hoel Kalloc, her betrothed, becomes jealous, and George marries her, after saving her from Hoel's brutality.
Wealthy Lucy Winter falls in love itinerant gardener George Turner much to her father's chagrin. In flashback we find there is a deep seated reason for his truculence, one that caused great sorrow to all. In time things are resolved after much soul searching.
The young Ruth Travers, left an orphan after the death of her father financially ruined by Mortimer Reynolds, is welcomed at home by Jimmy Carter, a young millionaire who becomes her guardian. Ruth's winsome qualities gradually win Jimmy's heart. Meanwhile at a Charity Ball, Ruth meets Mr. Reynolds, who is contriving to ruin her virtue.
Ralph Valentine, a penniless pianist, goes to Paris to pursue his career. He is attracted to two women: Pauline, the sweet and innocent daughter of his landlady, and Flora Margot, a woman of loose morals who runs with a wild crowd. Because of his irrational passion for Flora, Ralph makes a bargain with Satan, who gives him a magic skin which gratifies every wish and shrinks, along with the well-being of its possessor, in proportion to the number of wishes realized. Ralph tries in vain to rid himself of the skin after Pauline commits suicide because of his vices. Just as the devil comes to lead him into hell, Ralph awakes with the skin in his hands in an antique store where he had gone to buy a necklace for Flora. He throws down the skin, and runs to Pauline and professes his love for her, happy that he had been only dreaming.
A comic sketch that features two players who think each one is deaf, causing them to shout. Part of the Edison Kinetophone Collection. The Kinetophone was a fairly complex mechanical means of creating talking pictures. Unlike previous systems, in which actors would be required to lip sync to preexisting recordings on camera, the Kinetophone was one of the earliest film technologies to record sound at the same time as the image.