After Arathea Manning loses her hearing during an epidemic of scarlet fever among the children she teaches, her fiancé Arthur Endicott, who is involved with another woman, complains of always having to shout to make himself heard. An inventor, Gerald Staples, gives Arathea an auriphone, a device to restore her hearing, but one of her problem pupils, in a fit of rage, breaks it. Gerald asks Arathea, whom he calls "The Big Little Person -- small in size, but big in ideas," to be the secretary of his new company marketing the invention. He falls in love with her and plays the piano for her even though she hears only rumblings.