When twenty-one-year-old Ted Smith travels east to college by train in 1939, he makes a side trip to the town of Mansfield. This excursion to view the renowned Mansfield mansion may change the course of his life. As Ted peers up at the mansion, Walter Mansfield looks out and is dismayed to see a figure resembling his son, Walter, who perished in the Great War. Entranced, Mansfield quickly decides that Ted is a reincarnation of Walter and befriends the young man to have a second chance at being a father. Mansfield has grand plans for Ted and introduces him to the East Coast high society life. Ted, sent to the Ivy League college by his first-generation immigrant parents, is expected to graduate and return to the Midwest to assist with the expansion of his family's mom-and-pop grocery store into a chain. But Ted becomes entangled in Mansfield family politics and complicates the situation when he falls in love with Morgan Carnegie, whose family doesn't approve of him. The once-naïve young man from the Midwest comes of age and struggles with his love life and ambition which is in opposition to his family's expectations.