A rather undistinguished story of three youngsters, the impressionable late adolescent years of high school- and early college, as California backdrops the story of Felix Rhinelander, Hugh Conning, and Mary Willoughby. Felix who has financial, social and athletic prestige, many endowments but little stability, finds nothing of real value in his friendships, envies Hugh and his love, reciprocated, for Mary. Their love, however, is tried when Hugh discovers, indirectly, that Mary's mother is a gambling house operator, and Mary learns that Hugh has slept with another girl. Felix, during the interim, tries to marry Mary but she turns him down- knowing that Hugh will nevertheless be the boy she marries. First romances and rifts, in fabricated form.