In 1905, Dinah Sheldon (Shirley Temple), an enthusiastic art student, is expelled from Miss Ingram's Seminary for wearing two petticoats instead of five, attending political rallies and insisting that she be allowed to study nudes.

When she is sent home to Baltimore, Dinah's understanding father, Dr. Andrew Sheldon (Robert Young), an Episcopalian pastor, easily forgives his headstrong daughter this latest calamity, but her mother Lily (Josephine Hutchinson) encourages her to be more conventionally feminine.

Dinah's childhood sweetheart, Tom Wade (John Agar), also believes that she should settle down and confesses that, since her absence, he has begun dating the more "continental" Bernice Eckert (Carol Brannon).

While preparing the speech, which is a modified version of one of her own debates, Dinah learns that her exit from jail was witnessed by two women, who then relayed the information to Dan Fletcher (Albert Sharpe), Andrew's Scottish vestryman.

Instead, the less ambitious Andrew encourages Dinah's dreams by confessing that, as a youth, he had a short career as a ballroom dancer but gave it up to protect his father's reputation.

Later, Dinah visits Tom at the automobile garage where he works as a mechanic and begs him to pose for a portrait she intends to enter in a competition called "Spirit of Labor."