Seattle was still a young city after having shaken the ashes from her skirts 20 years earlier from the Great Fire of 1889. While Seattle boasts of a 500-room brothel which caters to men's desires, holding hands is an entitled privilege of courtship. Beneath the harnesses of whale bone corsets and suspensory belts strapped across loins, a new generation cries, "What can we not be obedient to?" Queen Victoria has been dead for eight years. Social as well as impassioned undercurrents between men and women are unraveling and intensifying.

While strait-laced notions are being taught on proper conduct while in the presence of real live men, and that beauty serves only to find husbands, the suffrage movement worries most men as it sweeps across the nation and Washington state.

One exception, being Nate Miller, who, after having carried the fainted Eleanor across the Fair grounds, finds her employed on Millionaire Row at his father's mansion. It would kill Nate to stay under his father's roof after a 14-year absence. It would kill him more if he could never see Eleanor again.

Financial family difficulties force Eleanor to leave her insurance company job for the deplorable position as "domestic" for the despised and hated Miller's who hold the mortgage on her family's house. It does not take Eleanor long

to realize that Nate intends to wake and stimulate feelings and instincts and desires that if roused, are believed to become diseased. As morbidly sensitive as love is, Nate finds himself competing for it with another man - Eleanor's older brother, Richard, who is stricken with tuberculosis.