In a vast icy landscape, a train of gold prospectors appears. In voice over, Ruby and Celeste recite two riddles and resolve to find the solutions in ninety minutes.

Ruby, dressed in a crinoline, descends a staircase into a ballroom. She dances with a series of men. Celeste appears, riding a white horse, and carries Ruby away to her room. Celeste talks of redressing the balance; Ruby says she has been kept in the dark.

As Ruby talks about the female star in the early days of cinema, she is seen in a small hut in a deserted snowfield. Celeste goes out into the night-time city streets to her job at a bank. When she asks to be told more about what she is doing, her boss tells her to get on with her job. Seeking information from 'the expert' sitting behind a huge desk, she asks if gold moves.

Meanwhile, Ruby remembers the hut in the snow and herself as a little girl. She asks about the secret of transformations. Donning a gumshoe outfit of trench coat and beret, she leaves Celeste's room to begin her own quest. Celeste leaves the bank, followed by two men, whom she eludes by climbing up a fire escape. Returning to her room, she finds Ruby gone. In a dream, she sees women dancing together, and another woman doing welding work on a ship.

Outside in the city streets, Ruby is pursued by several men. She enters a theatre and they follow her as she climbs up to the gallery. Looking down on the stage, she sees herself in the little hut in the snowfield, costumed and made up like a silent movie ingénue. She runs out of the theatre and, entering a derelict house, gives her pursuers the slip. Seeing two little girls and a woman digging in a garden, she follows them and finds herself on a large stage where a woman is tap-dancing. Their conversation is interrupted by a man, who grabs Ruby and pushes her onto a stage.

Ruby is once again the silent-movie ingénue, acting in a little play involving guns and gold nuggets: she plays her role unwillingly and the audience reacts with disapproval. She laughs; and the detective-Ruby watching from the gallery leaves the theatre, once more followed by the men. She enters the empty house again, and this time finds herself in the snowfield, as a little girl.

Meanwhile, Celeste's quest takes her to the financial area of the city, and she watches as two groups of men foregather. One group raises a stretcher bearing gold ingots; the other carries a bier bearing what appears from a distance to be a Madonna, but close up is revealed to be Ruby. They sing: 'To the bank with the beauty, to the bank with the gold; both make money and neither grows old. As the gold and the woman are carried into the bank, Ruby declares that she has been framed, and escapes with Celeste, chased by the men.

Ruby appears at the top of the staircase, asbefore, and descends to the ballroom: in voice-over, she explains the link between money and (female) stardom. This time the men, instead of dancing with her, fall down one by one. In voice-over, Celeste repeats the riddle that began their quest, which is now solved.