Elizabeth Baird is from the small town of Ionia, South Carolina. Her mother, Alicia, is a striking beauty who begrudges her daughter’s plainness and the poverty brought on by her husband’s alcoholism. Elizabeth is timid and stuttery, which people in Ionia praise as proper feminine modesty. When her father dies, she and Alicia become even more impoverished. There aren’t many work opportunities for single women in Ionia. Eventually, Elizabeth saves enough money to go to nursing school. There, her slow nature is interpreted as an intellectual deficit. After graduation, Elizabeth enlists in the army so she can travel. She plans to find a place where she and her mother can work successfully. In the wake of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth and many others are sent to aid American soldiers in the Philippines. Japanese forces invade the area and take the women as prisoners. The Japanese officials dislike the brashness of American women. Elizabeth’s shyness reminds them of the women in Japan, and they take a liking to her. Elizabeth becomes the nurses’ principal advocate. One day, US forces shoot down a Japanese plane, and it crashes in the forest nearby. The women cheer, but Elizabeth’s physical delay keeps her silent. An incensed guard kills the cheering women, but he spares Elizabeth’s life when he notices her restraint. After years of imprisonment, the war ends. US troops finally liberate Elizabeth and the other survivors. Their first stop in America is a hospital where they receive comprehensive checkups. A doctor finds a small lesion on Elizabeth’s brain, which has caused her delayed speech and movement for all these years. When Elizabeth arrives in Ionia, the town celebrates her as a war hero. The area is in an economic boom. Alicia is now wealthy. She runs a food packaging plant, which represents the prosperous postwar future of the South. Elizabeth realizes that her industrialized hometown will no longer accept her disability.