Gerard Alexander

A vivacious, carefree young girl is disgusted by the thought of growing old. In her despondency she adopts the motto "Who cares?" and does her best to live up to it, even after she marries the handsome and dashing Martin Grey.

After Arathea Manning loses her hearing during an epidemic of scarlet fever among the children she teaches, her fiancé Arthur Endicott, who is involved with another woman, complains of always having to shout to make himself heard. An inventor, Gerald Staples, gives Arathea an auriphone, a device to restore her hearing, but one of her problem pupils, in a fit of rage, breaks it. Gerald asks Arathea, whom he calls "The Big Little Person -- small in size, but big in ideas," to be the secretary of his new company marketing the invention. He falls in love with her and plays the piano for her even though she hears only rumblings.

Disapproving of the loose woman her father has married, Faith Ebbing leaves home and goes to work, but she later steals $5,000 in Liberty Bonds to pay off Duroc, a blackmailer threatening her mother, Cordelia Ebbing.

Court, a crook, is forced to marry Velma by her enraged fiancé, who mistakes him for her clandestine suitor.

A young man takes a trip to Europe, and when he returns home he brings along the woman he fell in love with and became engaged to. However, his snooty mother finds out that she doesn't come from a "good" family and is, in fact, a clerk in a shoe store, and refuses to sanction the engagement. The young man's uncle disagrees and tries to convince the mother to accept the young girl--but then begins to realize he is developing feelings for her himself.