[3] The story spans three years in the life of Lovey Mary, an orphan who finds acceptance among the poor folks of the Cabbage Patch, an area which was inspired by Rice's personal experiences growing up in Kentucky.

For the next two years Lovey Mary raises Tommy in the orphanage, helping him learn to talk and walk, and becoming his surrogate mother.

But when Kate Rider returns to claim him, Lovey Mary slips away with Tommy, eventually winding up in the Cabbage Patch, a rundown neighborhood on the fringes of Louisville.

Mary earns $3 a week sorting and packing tiles all day, enabling her to pay Miss Hazy for the room and Mrs. Wiggs for meals.

During the next year Mary gradually sheds the defensive attitude she brought into the Patch, that had caused Mrs. Wiggs to label her "a repeatin' rifle".

She helps Billy, Chris, and Mrs. Wiggs to load Mr. Stubbins, Miss Hazy's drunken husband of one week, into a west-bound freight car after he slaps Tommy.

During the winter holidays, Jack Shultz, who works at the Opera House, proposes the Patch kids put on a play, but the only available scripts are for Faust.

The New York Times Saturday Review of Books expressed "our liking for this little work of Alice Hegan Rice, for its comprehension of child life, its sympathy with the humble... and its delightful humor".

[6] Liebler & Company bought the dramatic rights for both Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch and Lovey Mary,[7] and at the suggestion of Alice Hegan Rice, commissioned her friend Anne Crawford Flexner to combine them into a stage play.