[1][2] Released from a boarding school of nuns in Como, the seventeen-year-old Milanese Elena Giordani manages to convince her parents to let her spend the summer holidays together with her Genoese friend Diana D'Aquino in her villa in Rapallo.

Diana takes advantage of Elena's presence to distract the young Milanese industrialist, Paolo Donati, who is trying to woo his mother.

After a walk in Portofino, where they meet Martina, a Dutch tourist, the inexperienced Elena is fascinated by Paolo and in a short time falls in love with him.

For this reason, more by impulse than by conviction, Elena decides to ask him for money, to avoid reporting him for having seduced a minor.

But Paolo has started a new story with Martina, the Dutch tourist he met on vacation, and Elena has understood that she cannot marry a man only out of necessity, as her mother had done years ago by accepting a marriage of interest.