Algie Stokes has ambition and ideas enough to make his way honestly in the world. At first there is one girl in his life, Harriet Meese, plain but a very good catch. Then he meets Marigold Bingham, astonishingly pretty and adorable, but resigned to living and working in poverty with her family on a canal boat. Yet it is a love match--until he meets Aurelia, elegant, sensitive and utterly beautiful , but the wife of Algie's callous employer, Benjamin Sampson.