Wealthy family late 19th or early 20th century New York. Daughter loves a man who her mother disapproves. Mother plots an engagement for her daughter Son loves a woman who is not his social equal. Family secretary is a black woman. She is sick but the family's white physician refuses to treat her.

It’s 1882 and the Gilded Age is in full swing when Marian Brook, a young orphaned daughter of a Southern general, moves in with her rigidly conventional aunts in New York City. With the help of Peggy Scott, an African-American woman masquerading as her maid, Marian gets caught up in the dazzling lives of her rich neighbors as she struggles to decide between adhering to the rules or forging her own path.

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, during what has become known as the Gilded Age, the population of the United States doubled in the span of a single generation. As national wealth expanded, two classes rose simultaneously, separated by a gulf of experience and circumstance that was unprecedented in American life. These disparities sparked passionate and violent debate over questions still being asked in our own times: How is wealth best distributed, and by what process? Does government exist to protect private property or provide balm to the inevitable casualties of a churning industrial system? The outcome of these disputes was both uncertain and momentous, and marked by a passionate vitriol and level of violence that would shock the conscience of many Americans today.

The daughter of a wealthy man secretly marries a man below her station— one whom her father violently disapproves of. The father, in an excess of parental concern, separates the lovers by sending his daughter away so that she might forget her lover, unaware of their married state. During this time, she gives birth to a daughter. After some months, the young mother returns to her family manor and presents her father with his new granddaughter, which causes a most unfortunate scene. Unbeknownst to the young woman, her enraged father falsely accuses his son-in-law of theft and has him incarcerated in order to separate the lovers in an irrational attempt to force his daughter to forget this "unworthy" young man.

When a Broadway actress marries the son of a wealthy New York family, his father does everything he can to try and split the couple up. Eventually convinced of her worthiness, he changes his mind and gives them his blessing.

A hard-working man falls in love with a wealthy woman but her father fights to keep them apart.

A woman aspires to get rich and surrenders to a wealthy old man who will marry her. The wife has a daughter from another man who denies her paternity, and the old man has a son and a daughter from a former wife. The old man indulges in gambling and leaves the rope to his wife in the west. She meets a young man who covets her husband’s wealth, so he blackmails him and plans to get rid of the husband to be inherited by his wife. To implement the plan, she must pretend to love the old man until he shocks the father.

Mrs. Force, a social parasite, with a beautiful daughter, is so closely pressed by her creditors, that she uses her beautiful child as an asset, urging her to accept the offer of the hand of an aged banker, Black, old enough to be her grandfather.

Ethel, whose financially distressed parents depend on her marrying into wealth, may be forced to abandon the man she loves for her father's rich friend.

A rich young man is attached to his father's stenographer. Knowing her character the father objects, disowning his son when he persists in big attentions to the girl. In the grip of poverty, the girl's true nature is disclosed, and the gentleness and goodness of her sister is revealed.