If there was one thing that Don Juan de Marana learned from his father Don Jose, it was that women gave you three things - life, disillusionment and death. In his father's case it was his wife, Donna Isobel, and Donna Elvira who supplied the latter. Don Juan settled in Rome after attending the University of Pisa. Rome was run by the tyrannical Borgia family consisting of Caesar, Lucrezia and the Count Donati. Juan has his way with and was pursued by many women, but it is the one that he could not have that haunts him. It will be for her that he suffers the wrath of Borgia for ignoring Lucrezia and then killing Count Donati in a duel. For Adriana, they will both be condemned to death in the prison on the river Tigre.

An honest and naive schoolteacher gets a lesson in how the world works outside the classroom, when a rich Baron and his mistress use the teacher's name and outstanding reputation in a crooked business scheme.

Wendell Lawson has only six months to live. Not wanting to endure his last few months of life waiting for the end, he decides to take matters into his own hands and enlists the help of a delusional mental patient to help him commit suicide.

Tycoon J.L. Higgins controls his whole family, but one of his sons- in-law, Dan Brooks and his daughter Alice are fed up with that. Brooks quits his job as manager of J.L.'s paper box factory and devotes his life to his racing horse Broadway Bill, but his bank- roll is thin and the luck is against him, he is arrested because of $150 he owes somebody for horse food, but suddenly a planed fraud by somebody else seems to offer him a chance...

Tom Collier has had a great relationship with Daisy, but when he decides to marry, it is not Daisy whom he asks, it is Cecelia. After the marriage, Tom is bored with the social scene and the obligations of his life. He publishes books that will sell, not books that he wants to write. Even worse, he has his old friend working as a butler and Cecelia wants him fired. When Tom tries to get back together with Daisy to renew the feelings that he once felt, Daisy turns the tables on him and leaves to protect both of them.

At the outbreak of the War Between the States, Maryland Calvert is loved by Maj. Alan Kendrick, son of a Virginia general, and Capt. Fulton Thorpe. Nancy, whom Thorpe has loved unwisely, follows him to Washington and commits suicide when she learns he will not marry her; as a result, Alan is forced to request his resignation. When Fort Sumter is fired upon, Alan, who admires Lincoln's principles, joins the Union Army though his father is among the Secessionist leaders; as a result, he is estranged from Maryland. Thorpe, who has joined the Confederacy as a spy, is responsible for Alan's arrest, but Maryland victoriously comes to his aid by ringing the alarm bell.