In this revealing late silent, Garbo plays a rebellious San Francisco debutante who determines to overturn the double standard which allows men to have affairs with impunity and denies women the same privilege. She meets a pugilist sailor-turned-artist (Nils Asther) and takes off with him on his yacht, the All Alone. On her return, she is indeed all alone, shunned by everyone except an old admirer (John Mack Brown) whom she gratefully marries. Garbo invests her character with layers of understanding: it seems that she alone comprehends the ironic defeat of this happy ending. Male critics at the time seemed to have relegated the plot to the stuff girls' dreams are made of, missing the irony of the film's message, and were bemused by the way Garbo failed to play into the stuff of boys' dreams: "The actress is most unfeline in her brazen directness" (Variety).