Dolly and Larry meet at a party thrown by a mutual friend, and they form an instant connection. As the weeks pass, however, their relationship loses its warmth and she can feel Larry pulling away. Dolly knows that she is pregnant, but she conceals this from Larry. One evening, he starts crying; out of sympathy and suppressed emotion, she cries with him, but he gets up suddenly and leaves her there. She does not hear from him for many days after. Then Larry returns to her, determined to get married; but the catch is that he wants to marry a ‘virgin,’ and therefore he and Dolly can do nothing but kiss. She longs to tell him that a ‘pure’ woman is a strange thing to want, especially because they have a child on the way, but she can never quite manage the words. The baby comes in February – after the concealment with tight corsets, Dolly is sure that it will be stillborn. She checks into a hotel room with old newspapers and a suitcase, and gives birth in the bath-tub. To her great surprise, the baby is alive, and so beautiful that she cannot help but love him. Despite this, she knows that Larry would never accept the baby. Dolly suffocates the boy with a towel, places the corpse in the suitcase, and buries it by the river.   Dolly and Larry are married a few months later, but he does not love her as much as he did before they were married. She learns that he has several mistresses – but the shock of her life occurs when a schoolteacher, Miss Portingal, comes to her doorstep and declares that Larry has gotten her sister Myrtle pregnant. Since they cannot keep the baby, Dolly offers to adopt it, and brings home Baby Goliath, who she thinks of as her own dead son returned to her. At first Larry is outraged, but soon he calms down and accepts the boy, unaware that it is his own son. Then Miss Portingal comes to her door, and by her mourning clothes Dolly can tell that Myrtle has died. According to her, Myrtle revealed on her deathbed that Goliath was not really fathered by Larry, and that she would understand if Dolly no longer wished to care for him. Dolly vehemently denies this, saying that Goliath is her son now, and Miss Portingal leaves after saying that any child would be lucky to have Dolly as its mother.