A young man proposes a lottery with himself as the prize in marriage. However he finds himself very much in love with a woman other than the winner.
An ambitious bank teller (Edward Jose) steals a large deposit and starts life over under an assumed name. While he is becoming a lawyer and making his way up the ladder of success with the help of a political boss, the wife he left behind (Eleanor Woodruff) remains destitute and is forced to give up her child to an orphanage. The girl is adopted and grows up (played as an adult by Virginia Pearson) to become the secretary to an honest young lawyer. But the girl has the same quirk that her father had, and it causes her to steal a bracelet at a department store. She is arrested and finds herself before her father, who is now a judge.
Theda Bara plays the social-climbing Olga Dolan, who becomes the Duchess of Rutledge by means of deception and sheer ruthlessness. Sadly, Bara, who had more or less single-handedly begun the "vamp" craze with the prototype of the genre, A Fool There Was, went out with little more than a whisper. She left films after the ironically titled The Lure of Ambition, and was lured back only twice, in: The Unchastened Woman (1925), a poverty row concoction which had few takers, and Madame Mystery (1926)
