Hildy, the journalist former wife of newspaper editor Walter Burns, visits his office to inform him that she’s engaged and will be getting remarried the next day. Walter can’t let that happen and frames the fiancé, Bruce Baldwin, for one thing after another, to keep him temporarily held in prison, while trying to steer Hildy into returning to her old job as his employee.

An Englishman (Leslie Howard) who has been studying painting in Paris for four years, is advised by his art teacher that his work is mediocre and second-rate, and that he lacks promise. So he returns to London, England to take up studies to become a medical doctor, but his older age and introspection make it difficult for him to keep up in his scholastic work. In England, he becomes infatuated - and then obsessed by a blonde, lower-class, slatternly and vulgar, Cockney-accented, illiterate tearoom waitress named Mildred Rogers (Bette Davis)