Acting
Valerie St. Cyr, seizes a chance for excitement and money, deserts her infant daughter Joan and her impoverished husband and runs away to Paris with the Count Du Poissy. Years later, without knowing that they are mother and daughter, both Valerie and Joan fall in love with artist Julian St. Saens, who rejects the former but becomes engaged to the latter. Enraged, Valerie convinces the count to kidnap Joan, but after she is captured, Joan stabs the count to death. When Valerie learns that Joan is her daughter, she takes the blame for the murder and goes to the guillotine while Joan, still unaware that Valerie is her mother, makes plans with Julian for their marriage.
Lucille Caruthers travels from her home in the South to New York, hoping for a career on the stage. She is aided in her dream by the theatre star Serge Ratakin, and she becomes a star in her own right. But Ratakin is jealous and possessive and attempts to sabotage her. After a violent conflict with Ratakin, Lucille believes she has killed him. But has she?
A candidate for governor, eager Gerald Harper persuades his equally ambitious wife Carol to enlist the aid of her friend Diana Casper, whose influence with political boss Jarvis Flint could help him win the election. Carol agrees to speak to Diana on condition that Gerald temporarily assume her work in the city's tenements.
A mother discovers her daughter Susan is marrying an insufferable social-climber. Already horrified by the idea, she also finds out her son Martin has gone into a life of crime. She decides to head to Paris to forget about her domestic troubles. She marries Richard Elliot, the executor of her late husband's estate.
Bella Donna ( Pauline Frederick ) a seductive woman snares Nigel Armine ( Thomas Holding ) into marriage and he takes her to Egypt to live. Tired of her simple husband, Bella becomes involved with brutish Baroudi. To get rid of Nigel, she begins slowly poisoning him. However, Nigel's friend Dr. Isaacson arrives in time to save him. Now Baroudi wants nothing to do with Bella, and neither does her husband. Totally alone now, the distraught Bella wanders off into the desert.
When Marquita Shay, the adopted daughter of Canadian farmer John Grayson, reaches womanhood, Grayson enrolls her in a St. Louis boarding school where she meets and marries Humphrey Wells, the son of a wealthy financier. Treated like a servant by her in-laws, Marquita leaves the Humphrey's home to return to Grayson. She discovers that Grayson has committed suicide after falling victim to a phony stock deal perpetrated by Wells senior. Time passes and Marquita travels to New York where she becomes secretary to Baron Brinker who, with Wells, swindled Grayson. She brings Wells and Brinker to their financial ruin and reunites with her husband who renounces his father.
Carlotta Peel, who though sheltered from the facts of life by her Victorian aunt has acquired some knowledge from indiscriminate reading, meets Diaz, a celebrated pianist, at a concert and spends the evening with him. Later, in London, she acquires fame as a novelist and is followed to France by married publisher Frank Ispenlove, who commits suicide when she spurns him. In Paris, Carlotta finds Diaz a physical wreck from drinking absinthe and devotes herself to his regeneration.
Corporal Blake is sent to apprehend the murderer of François Breault. All evidence points to Jan Thoreau as the guilty man. Blake arrives at Thoreau's cabin while he is away and is greeted by his wife Marie. Posing as a friend of her husband, Blake learns that Thoreau and Breault had quarreled shortly before the murder. This, together with Breault's dying accusation that Thoreau was his murderer, seems undeniable evidence. Blake, fascinated by Marie, agrees to let Thoreau escape, providing that she become his mistress. After much anguish, she consents. When Thoreau arrives, Blake arrests him but during the night Marie helps him escape. Blake goes in pursuit.
The film begins by presenting the elderly and elegant Duke and Duchess of Maldon, engaged in charitable acts in a Dickensian village. The following day, the duke falls off his horse and is mortally injured. Mourning the loss of her great love, the duchess collapses in church, and in the “moment before death” she reviews her own life. “It was in her youth that she had fractured practically all the Biblical commandments,” says the intertitle. In fact, when she was young, Madge the duchess was a seductive gypsy, engaged to the fiery gypsy John, but fascinated by Harold, the idle aristocratic son of the Maldons, who was prone to the family vice of excessive drinking. In love with the gypsy, Harold brings her home as a servant, scandalizing his older brother. A fight between the brothers and John’s jealousy lead to a fatal accident that forces both Harold and the gypsy couple to flee to Australia.
A successful artist and a struggling one both love the same woman; she chooses the poor one but as the years roll on and other choices she makes and her husband’s misunderstanding lead to a near breaking point for the couple.
The mind of theology student Webster Smith becomes unbalanced from strain.
Madge Nelson is ordered to move to the countryside for health reasons, but her finances prevent her from making the move from the city, so she answers an advertisement for a mail-order bride for miner Hugo Ennis in Nevada.
Mrs. Sherwood hates her life with her husband, who is drinking increasingly as a result of his own unhappiness in the marriage. Mrs. Sherwood is in love with Le Roy Scott, who encounters a woman of astonishingly identical features to Mrs. Sherwood. He contrives to substitute the other woman, Marion Roche, in Mrs. Sherwood's place while he and Mrs. Sherwood escape for a tryst. But Marion is much more the wife that Sherwood dreamed of, and he falls in love "anew" with his "wife," and she with him. She determines to find some way to permanently replace the real Mrs. Sherwood.
In 17th century France, young D'Artagnan wants to join the King's Musketeers, but instead befriends three legendary musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—and together, they become embroiled in the political intrigue surrounding King Louis XIII and his adversaries, particularly the powerful Cardinal Richelieu.
Bobby Austin is sent to Madrid on a diplomatic mission. He is followed by Lady Sylvia Hutton, a society adventuress who is infatuated with him. She takes him on a yachting trip to Monte Carlo where he meets Kathleen Lawrence, a notorious "kept" woman, who tries to save him from the ruin that Lady Sylvia bears in her wake.
The mill of an old woman and her ward, Faith Newton, is being terrorized by the masked menace of the title known as "Still Face". The women are helped by a man named Keats Dodd. The masked villain's identity is revealed in the final chapter.
Over ten episodes an heiress is threatened by the gang of a criminal who seems to have returned from the dead. Clay Shelton was executed for his crimes, but it seems he has returned to life to exact revenge on the people responsible for his death.
In managing the shipyard inherited from her father, Derith Keogh has considerable labor problems and accedes to the unreasonable demands of John Trevelyan, an anarchist labor agitator. Derith's brother John is off in pursuit of an adventuress, and Angus Campbell, her superintendent, resigns in exasperation. Angus returns, however, to help Derith persuade Trevelyan to settle a strike, which Trevelyan accomplishes in spite of being shot by one of his own men.
A British engineer in India takes a simple native girl as his bride, an act which defies social strictures and leads to tragedy.
Leone, a Papal guard, is devastated when his wife drowns herself after mistakenly thinking that he had abandoned her. He turns over his son David to be brought up by nuns, then enters a monastery. David is brought to London and is raised to be a beggar and thief until he is rescued by Dr. Roselli, an Italian political refugee, who raises David with his daughter Donna Roma. Years later David gets heavily involved in Italian politics and incurs the enmity of the corrupt Italian Prime Minister, which leads him to discover the hidden secrets of his family's past--and present.
