Heiress Sybil Drew is told by her Aunt Annabelle she must earn her own living for a year or be disinherited. Setting out for New York she finds many adventures and toils, including being mistaken for a thief before true love and success come her way.
A 1917 silent film drama
The picture starts with Robert Warwick walking into the office of director Albert Capellani (the film's actual director). Capellani offers him the role of a heavy and hands him the script. The next four reels show Warwick playing a Raffles-like character, an ingenious crook who moves through society, committing robberies and even murder.
The first screen adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel to star a black man in the title role.
When his wife Grace inherits her father's stock, John Miller, the president of the Western Power and Development Company, becomes a millionaire and moves to New York with his family. Beset by business problems, Miller pays little attention to his wife, and Grace, feeling neglected, takes up with a bohemian set. Among her new acquaintances she meets Stuart Mordant, the attorney for Thomas Hurd, a business rival of Miller's. Grace seeks refuge from loneliness in Mordant, who makes a bargain with Hurd to gain control of her husband's company for half a million dollars.
The girlfriend of the son of a rich railroad tycoon, attempts to help him escape the clutches of his well-meaning, but over-bearing mother whilst encouraging her own father not to give up on his business, by instigating a staged kidnapping and black-mailing scheme.
Gene Romaine lives in the solitude of Tall Pine Mountain with her father, fire warden for the Stanton Lumber Company. They live alone, but her mother's grave is in the little clearing and the father has promised never to leave it. To them comes McDaniels, the logging boss, who is attracted by Jean and offers her father to discard his Indian wife for the young girl. Romaine indignantly refuses and is threatened with dismissal. Gene, knowing he cannot bear to leave his wife's grave, assents to the marriage in spite of her father's protests. Stanton, chief owner of the lumber company, maroons his worthless son in the woods, in the hope of reforming him. Gene takes care of him when he sprains his ankle, and he protects her from McDaniels and is blamed for the murder of the boss when his vengeful Indian wife stabs him in the back.
In order to help her poverty-stricken family, Jonnie Consadine, a strong-willed young woman from the Blue Ridge Mountains, comes to the city and takes a job in a mill, while her uncle, Pros Passmore, continues his endless search for a lost silver mine.
Hugh Eltinge, a struggling artist, and Mark Dunbar, a genius of the pen, whom the world has as yet failed to reward, live together in MacDougal Alley. Across the hall is Doris Golden, a reporter on the Evening Star, who enthuses over the work of both. Mark's novel is sold and Hugh and Doris see a new Mark. Mark begs Hugh to allow him to stake him until his pictures sell, but pleasure in his new clothes and new popularity dwindle as he sees his old friends will not profit by them. A happy idea strikes him and he buys all of Hugh's paintings on exhibition at a local dealer, requesting that his name be not mentioned.
A feisty, independent young woman, Damophilia Illington ("Phil" for short, hence the title), the daughter of a progressive university professor, is devastated by the sudden death of her father. The town's banker, an arrogant stuffed shirt, wants to marry Phil and has himself declared her guardian. Not wanting to marry him, she quickly leaves town and lands a job at a nearby university as an assistant to a professor of Greek literature (an area in which her father trained her) who is bitter and resentful after the breakup of his engagement to a woman who, it turned out, had been lying to him. "Phil", however, is determined to win him over.
Cardinal Mercier protects the altar of his church from desecration when German forces invade the Belgian city of Louvain during World War I. Although the soldiers commit widespread atrocities, the cardinal does his best to protect the townspeople.
Whiskey smuggler Dubec, trades liquor to the Indians, takes revenge on the Royal North West Mounted Police pursuing him by killing the wife of post commander Sergeant Delisle and abducting his teen-aged daughter Nonette.
Alice Brady plays a farm girl who marries the son of her next-door neighbor. Her dreams of a gay social whirl are shattered when her husband takes a job as a railway station agent in a lonely prairie outpost. Desperate for companionship, she begins an affair with the railroad president's son, unaware at first that her lover is likewise married.
A man discovers that he has two personalities--and one of them is a notorious strangler.
John Keefe, a gambler, shoots and kills Robert Barrington in an argument over a card game. Keefe steals Barrington's papers and forges a bill of sale to himself for Barrington's stable of race horses back east. The stable includes the prize filly, Wildfire. Meanwhile, Barrington's daughters, Henrietta and Myrtle, are becoming worried about their father's long absence in the West. John Garrison, the sheriff of the town in which Barrington was killed, goes East to investigate. He suspects Keefe (now called John Duffy) and begins to build a case, causing Henrietta to become suspicious. Keefe, realizing that the game is almost up, tries to get Wildfire's jockey to throw the big race, but Henrietta saves the day and Wildfire wins.
Vesta Wheatley is the daughter of a Virginia physician; John Randolph is a New Yorker who buys a tract of land from her father. Vesta and John fall in love, get married, and move to New York. They are followed, however, by a persistent old flame of Vesta's, Dick Mortimer. He tracks her down to a mountain cabin, where she is alone. A burglar breaks in on the two, and Dick is killed trying to protect Vesta. The burglar blackmails Vesta until she finally becomes desperate and shoots him in her own home.
During a lawn party at his New York home, steel magnate Theodore Morton claims he is bankrupt as a deterrent to Lord Dormer and the Duke of Medonia, two fortune hunters competing for his niece, Betty. After the suitors depart, unscrupulous Carl Gates is informed by his fiancée, banker's secretary Adele Shelby, that Theodore was lying. Carl pursues Betty, who accepts his proposal with the belief that the marriage will benefit her uncle. During a yachting expedition with Carl, Betty falls overboard and is rescued by architect Tom Waring, who is competing in a race. Tom wins with Betty on board, and a romance develops.
