This is the story of a bawdy house madam who becomes a respectable mother and businesswoman.

Tacey Cromwell begins with an orphaned boy running away from a very harsh eastern Kansas home of one uncle with a dog from another uncle, some time in the 1890s or 1900s. The dog does not make it out of Kansas, but the boy ("Nugget") finds the half-brother (Gaye Oldaker) whom he has never seen in Socorro, a New Mexico silver-mining boom town, where he is a dealer in the casino part of the town's best bordello, the White Palace, and living with the title character, the bordello's proprietor. Together they move to Brewery Gulch in the copper-mining town of Bisbee, Arizona. The narrator recalls with anguish the "respectable" townswomen getting the two children Tacey was raising taken away and her difficult life as his own was eased by his brother marrying into the local elite (following Tacey's directions even about whom to marry). The novel was filmed in 1955 as "One Desire" starring Anne Baxter, Rock Hudson, and Natalie Wood. The "one desire" was to escape the circa-1900 stigma of a scarlet letter.