A young woman married into an aristocratic English family finds life with her husband dull and decides to elope with a Canadian. However her mother-in-law, who did something similar thirty years before, tries to prevent her.

Elizabeth, the wife of ambitious and foppish Clive Champion-Cheney, finds her marriage a bitter disappointment because of her husband's puritanical ideas. She consequently falls in love with Ted, a young Canadian who is visiting them. Clive's mother, Lady Catherine, who ran away from her husband thirty years before with a lover, pays them a visit, and when Elizabeth connives to leave with Ted, her mother-in-law warns her against it, citing her own life as an example of the consequences. Clive, learning of his wife's intentions and advised by his divorced father, tries to regain his wife's affections; she agrees to stay with him, but when Ted takes matters in his own hands Elizabeth returns to her young lover.