Before Ima's 1905 romance, Governor Hogg has a fateful accident.

The year of Ima’s “Sweetheart” romance, her father had a serious injury.

 In late January [1905] a fateful accident took place. On January 26, ex-Governor Hogg, en route by train from Varner to Houston, was involved a collision. The passenger car in which he was riding rammed into another car, and Hogg was thrown violently to the floor. At first the injuries seemed to be only bruises, and Ima continued her socializing in Austin. She gave a “German” (a ball) on February 3, honoring her visiting San Antonio friends. But Ima’s Austin social whirl was halted and the family’s life took an unexpected turn two days after Ima's party, when she received a telegram that her father was seriously ill in Houston. An abscess had formed at the back of his neck, and he was about to have surgery.

 “Of course I rushed to him,” Ima wrote later.

To reach and treat the abscess, as Hogg later told his physician nephew, William Davis, Houston doctors “had to cut it from five different places in my mouth.” [1]These surgical procedures weakened his already strained heart, and Ima became his devoted nurse. He was critically ill and bedridden “for practically eight weeks,” as Ima wrote to Mike in Lawrenceville. But by March their father was much improved and able to travel with Ima and Tom to San Antonio for a stay at the Menger Hotel--but not for long.

---The Hoggs of Texas: Letters and Memoirs of an Extraordinary Family (2013).

It was mostly downhill from there.