Depression, and then, “a livelier frame of mind.”

In the days after her father’s death, Ima Hogg, age 23, slipped into what we today would call a depression. She found some solace in taking rides with her beloved Arabian horse, Napoleon, almost every day. (Houston in those days was still a horse-friendly city.)

        

         In late March Will wrote to a friend that Ima was “improving, but still almost sick.” He was heartened by her desire to resume her music studies in New York. Will wrote, ‘She says she can more quickly find herself in that way than she can by stayng in Houston, Austin, or elsewhere.“ But four months passed, and she did not go. Will wrote to their grandfather Stinson that Ima had not “been at all well since father’s death,” and that she was “still quite nervous and restless, especially of nights.”

        

         In December 1906 Will took Ima and her brother Tom to New York, and she decided to immerse herself again in her music. Soon, according to Will, she was “in a livelier frame of mind.”

          In July 1907 Ima sailed for Europe to travel and study.

        

         She did not come home until October 1908.