An imaginary Black servant on a turn-of-the-century plantation ends up permanently changing the owner's fortunes — despite being a figment of his imagination.

In France, an extremely wealthy man who owns a porcelain collection is invited to lunch by an odd-ball art dealer who has an elderly, eccentric socialite friend that collects porcelain de sax.

A woman returns home to her family having just slept with another man. At dinner, her son gets into an argument with his father about their privilege. As the narrative moves back to the time they spent abroad in Nigeria, Burma and Ecuador, fractures in the family life are revealed.

A successful gentleman whose ventures have recently failed goes on a miserable quest to find a seam of ore, following a questionable character who claims to have found it.

A former stableboy set to marry the wealthy daughter of the proprietress defies his future-wife's wishes to turn him into a gentleman and returns to his horses.

A newly engaged couple visits their married friends in the countryside, where they learn more about marriage, life, and love than they had ever hoped.

As an old woman revisits her family's quintessentially American history, she finds a way to respect and love her parents, despite the scandals and tragedies they endured.

When a middle-aged woman finds out that her deceased father, a prominent New York justice in the early 20th century, was cuckolded by her mother, the daughter reevaluates her father’s far-reaching influence on her life.

Two worlds collide at an upper-class event, where a man working for a charity grovels for donations, and a millionaire French aristocrat looks for a cause that will make her seem altruistic.

A Polish man living in America who inherits the title of Count after his parents' death has spent his life studying and teaching political philosophy in Chicago. His formal and aristocratic habits stick out among Americans, and when he begins dating one of his students, a young Jewish woman and a divorcee, he wonders if he can ever truly change his ways.