This is the story of Jenny Pearl, starting with her birth in respectable working-class or lower middle-class Islington. Jenny, daughter of a feckless father but a strong, strict and loving mother sets her heart on training as a ballet dancer. However, because of her lack of application once at ballet school, she ends up in the chorus at Piccadilly's Orient Palace of Varieties. There she meets the upper-middle-class would-be artist Maurice Avery, and they begin a passionate but ultimately unconsummated relationship. When Maurice goes abroad, and Jenny fails to join him, the relationship collapses. Jenny returns home to find her mother has lost her mind and has to be committed to a mental hospital. When her mother dies, Jenny discovers that her mother’s mental illness was probably caused by her belief that Jenny had slept with Maurice. Consumed with guilt, Jenny accepts the next proposal of marriage to the Cornish farmer Zachary Trewellha. This rapidly leads to the melodramatic and tragic conclusion of the story.