Maija is young, beautiful, innocent – and naïve. So she believes the declarations of love coming from sailor Aarne, until he repudiates their engagement under pressure from his father. Maija then leaves her island paradise in the skerries and takes a job as a housemaid in the city. When the son of her employer gets her pregnant, she is turned out of the house. That is the beginning of Maija’s inexorable descent to the lower levels of society, until she finally ends up as a disillusioned prostitute on the waterfront. In this heart-breaking melodrama, director Teuvo Tulio tells a story of the love and the suffering of woman who has been abandoned and betrayed, and is utterly alone in a merciless world of men. He uses the harbour as a locale of pleasure, degradation, and decay, a hotbed of vice, which he shoots as a dark counterpoint to the sun-drenched islands of the Baltic.