A woman returning from a trip to Paris must help U.S. customs inspectors find a valuable necklace suspected to be in the possession of a fellow traveler. The film is presumed lost.
Poverty forces Helen Shirley, a country lass, into New York in search of a living. Shy and unsophisticated, Helen falls an easy victim of the notorious band which preys upon young girls and she is easily induced to go to a boarding house which is in reality the headquarters of the gang.
Financial troubles force Nell Carroll, a thoroughbred, to seek employment in a detective agency which has just taken up the trail of a very baffling jewelry robbery in an exclusive summer colony. In order to work from the inside, she is sent to the place as the Baroness Du Vassey.
A notorious gambler and card cheat, George Forrester, rules a little western town with an iron hand. The men of the town plot to catch him cheating and do, but his men save him from danger. In the same town lives Gerald Austen, or Aitkens, who had left his tyrannical father in the east and made good in the west.
Hazel Dawn starred as Clarissa, who upon graduating from a private girl's school learns that her widowed father has remarried. At first resentful of her new stepmother (Dorothy Bernard), Clarissa slowly warms up to the woman. Later on, the heroine falls in love with a handsome attorney named Gambier (James Kirkwood), only to be disillusioned when she catches the attorney and the stepmother in a warm embrace.
The "girl" of the title was played by Hazel Dawn, a popular stage actress who briefly enjoyed a flourishing film career. Dawn plays Miss Shipley, an American girl vacationing in France. Our heroine finds herself the romantic bone of contention between two "men of the world" (William Roselle and Hal Clarendon), who end up fighting a duel over her affections.