Rev. Dr. Penfield Sturgis, of fashionable St. Martins-in-the-Lane, finds himself face to face with Jane Bartlett, a grand opera prima donna whose opera he has denounced on grounds of morality, and who comes to his very vestry room to make him "eat his sermon word for word." Out of the encounter a strange acquaintance develops, Jane Bartlett interested through vindictive reasons, the rector through the challenge to his church. She prevails upon him to visit the notorious opera, which but deepens his previous convictions, but meanwhile he discovers a surprising humanity in the woman herself. Just as it is beginning to dawn upon him that maybe he takes himself a shade too seriously, word comes that the Mayor has closed "Zaporah" on the strength of his own condemnatory sermon. Repentant, Sturgis decides to apologize in an open letter to the newspapers, at which his vestry and congregation, already perturbed by the ascendancy of the Bartlett woman, are up in arms.