When all the families on the Hill decide to launch their daughters in an elaborate debut season, beautiful Lynn Chambers is delighted. With her best beau, Paul, away at college, it will make her senior year less lonely, for this will be a time of elegant parties and dances. But when Dr. Chambers refuses to let his daughter participate in this display of snobbishness, Lynn finds herself ostracized from the community in which she grew up. Tense and frustrated, she mistakes Paul's gener for infidelity, and sick with a sense of isolation, allows herself to become involved with a shiftless young man from the wrong side of the tracks. Her new sense of compassion, based on her feeling of not belonging, teaches her to understand and help the confused boy, and when she and Paul are reunited, it is with a more certain, more meaningful understanding.