Carrie, Diana Barrymore, a strong-willed but mischievous 20-year-old actress, returns from a successful Detroit stage run to New York to see her mother, Christine 'Chris' Bishop, Kay Francis. Chris confesses she has a new boyfriend, Steve Forbes, John Boles, and shares that she’s grown anxious about how Steve would view Carrie if he knew her daughter’s true age. To help Chris win Steve’s heart, Carrie hatches a bold plan: she disguises herself as a twelve-year-old, braids her hair into pigtails, dresses in children’s clothes, and acts startlingly immature whenever Steve and his younger friend Jim Blake Robert Cummings arrive. A photograph of Carrie as an adult—accidentally seen by Steve and Jim—gets described as Chris’s alcoholic sister, complicating the web of deception.
Despite the ruse, Carrie and Jim find themselves drawn to each other, and when it becomes clear that Jim has a girlfriend, Carrie crafts a clever series of excuses to keep him by her side, prompting his girlfriend to walk away. Their outings are marked by misadventures: Carrie’s hand is cut during a visit to an ice-cream parlor, and on another excursion she speeds in a car, gets arrested, and somehow manages to dodge admitting her true age. All the while, Carrie’s double life creates a tense but comic tension between affection, obligation, and fabrication.
The night before Carrie is scheduled to return to Detroit to act in a stage version of Joan of Arc, Carrie and Chris head to a nightclub to celebrate. There, the two men re-enter the scene, and Steve and Jim face the truth in different ways. Jim, who has begun to realize his feelings for Carrie even as he pretends to be Steve’s ally, suspects the ruse after noticing the hand injury. A confrontation follows: Jim leaves in anger, while Carrie trails him, explaining everything as she rides with him in his car. They end up by a lake, where Jim’s retaliation turns into a spontaneous moment of vulnerability as he throws her into the water before driving away.
Meanwhile, the dynamic between Steve and Chris shifts under the weight of the truth. Steve proposes marriage, and Chris calmly reveals the elaborate scheme that made their relationship possible in the first place, laying bare the lengths to which she went to protect both her daughter’s chances and Steve’s feelings. As the emotional layers unfold, Jim’s own confession shifts the course of the story: he realizes he loves Carrie. He then sneaks onto the Joan of Arc set, disguises himself as a knight, and, in a bold, in-character moment, proposes to Carrie mid-scene. Carrie, still fully in character as a devoted partner, accepts the unexpected proposal, sealing a romance that began under a veil of disguise but moves toward a future built on genuine emotion.
