Henry Jekyll (John Barrymore) is a doctor of medicine living and working in London in the late 1880s. When he is not treating the poor in his free clinic, he is in his laboratory experimenting. Sir George Carew (Brandon Hurst), the father of Jekyll’s fiancée Millicent (Martha Mansfield), is suspicious of the young doctor’s intentions and often irritated by his tardiness and highmindedness. "No man", Carew observes, "could be as good as he looks." Following dinner one evening, Carew taunts his prospective son-in-law in front of their mutual friends and debates with him about the causes and effects of a person's personality, insisting that every man is fundamentally composed of two "selves" who are in continual conflict. "A man cannot destroy the savage in him by denying its impulses", instructs Carew. "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."