A young boy is staying with friends of his family for a summer in New Orleans where he is to attend a six-week intensive French course. His mother relays his interest in mechanical objects, so the host brings him into a parlor to take a look at a certain object in her possession. She shows him a full-size doll, four-foot doll with the features of an adolescent girl dressed in nineteenth century European attire. The boy is confused at first, but she invites him to sit and observe the doll for a moment. Suddenly the doll begins to turn toward him, leading with her hazel eyes and fixing her gaze upon him. Her motions are incredibly lifelike, and she cycles through an array of different movements at disparate intervals. The woman says they discovered the doll in the attic in a box stamped '1892'; they knew little about it and had never seen anything like it.

Over the next few days the boy observes all the doll's motions, increasingly intrigued by her uncanny realism. He'd hoped to find himself a girlfriend in New Orleans but the girls in his class are all older than him, so more and more of his time is spent in the parlor observing the doll. He begins talking to her, leaving notes in her hand, researching Switzerland where the woman believes she was made. When the host couple are out for the night, he opens the doll's toolbox and discovers she was actually made in Prague, and her name is Moriya. He undresses her, and she moves her hand along his thigh. Soon he realizes the doll is actually climbing on top of him, grinding against his groin until he comes.

The boy engineers several similar encounters between Moriya and himself. He dreams of the two of them in Prague. When he next has a long stretch alone with her, he disassembles her and marvels at the machinery inside - the doll actually generates her own electricity, can sense heat and therefore respond to touch - feats that the boy reasons must have been the very limits of engineering at the time of her construction. But in the course of looking he loses the doll's flywheel, just barely managing to move the shaft back into a workable position. After the incident, he swears the doll is less passionate, looking toward with reproach in her eyes. The time comes for him to leave New Orleans, and he bids the doll farewell.