Three women, Arleta Goodfellow, (a photographer, sometimes a whore, sometimes a mistress), Susan (Su Wah) Washington (is half Chinese, the illegitimate daughter of a missionary and is trained in medicine by life on the road) and Sponetta Faye, (the innocent daughter of a traveling preacher, a run away child wife and at last a gifted landscape artist) all pass through each other's early years leaving long ago memories both good and bad. In later life they meet again causing life altering changes.