Visiting Venice with her mother, Bostonian ingenue Lavinia Johnstone soon tires of their fellow American tourists and of her mother's unstinting attempts to find her a husband. Instead, she chooses to spend her time alone, and her gaze soon falls on a local gondolier. Frustrated that his services are in such demand, she creates a fantasy world in which they are together - but as her imagination takes hold, the line between her two 'worlds' becomes increasingly blurred.