Plot
Fiona, Evelyn, and Susanna are the Gaylord sisters. There are no brothers. When their mother dies on the sunken RMS Lusitania, and their army officer father, Penn Gaylord, is killed in France, they must manage their Fifth Avenue mansion by themselves—never realizing their half billion dollar inheritance because of legal system gimmickry. Fiona (Barbara Stanwyck) is the eldest of the three children, and the daughter whom Penn referred to as "my son" and "the head of the household" upon his departure for the European front. Fiona tells the family servants that she will henceforth be known as "Miss Gaylord" rather than "Miss Fiona".
Fiona and her two sisters grow up, and Fiona marries her antagonist, Charles Barclay (George Brent), in a last-ditch effort to finalize the probate of Penn's will, which had been tied up in court for some 25 years. Barclay had campaigned to keep the will from being settled, just so he could force the three sisters to sell him their mansion for the purpose of leveling it and profitably developing the real estate. His motive appears to be nothing more than greed. This was the case, even though Barclay used as his purported reason for tying up the will, Penn's wartime bequeathal (in a French will) of 10% of the Gaylord estate to a French orphanage. Fiona has no objection to the approximately 50 million dollar change in the original American will on behalf of those less fortunate, but she is adamantly opposed to the real estate development. She makes this known at a court proceeding when she and her sisters walk out on the latest round of delaying tactics. Fiona's unwavering opposition is based on her father's last instructions to her before his departure to Europe and subsequent death in combat. He tells his daughter that their loyalty to the family home is "almost as much" as their loyalty to God. For some 175 years prior to World War II, the Gaylord creed had always been, "Never sell the land!"
Read more about this topic: The Gay Sisters
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
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And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)