The World, the Flesh and the Devil

In 1904, Margaret, the most passionate of the Donovan children, leaves her lumber mill family for a convent. She falls in love with her confessor, who's fulfilling a family obligation. Scandal and guilt drive the lovers apart. Margaret gives up her vocation and leaves her religiously obsessed father's house. She and Lily, her cellmate from the convent, move across the state to work in Lily's father's millinery shop. Margaret marries well, but the Roaring Twenties and subsequent crash of '29 tax her ingenuity. Then coincidence rekindles the earlier scandals, changing Margaret's and Lily's lives again.