William Delaney Trent

William Delaney Trent, called Dad by his children, is a prominent Dallas attorney whose family life joins local affluence, paternal affection, and strong patriotic convictions. He is presented both as the head of a prosperous Texas household and as a father whose attachment to his daughter, Anne Elizabeth Trent, becomes especially visible when illness and her plans to go overseas test his wish to keep her close.

Identity and Family Background

The Trents live on Pleasant Avenue, described as the finest street in Dallas, a city characterized as the biggest and fastest-growing town in Texas. The family’s home and status sit within a sweeping rhetoric of civic and national pride: the narration enlarges from Dallas to Texas and the United States, while casting Anne Elizabeth as Dad’s cherished only daughter. Her mother died when she was very young. The text gives no further account of William’s life before or after that loss, but his place as father and household head shapes the family scenes that follow.

William is a prominent attorney. His children include Anne Elizabeth, Spencer Anderson Trent, known as Buster, and Buddy, whose full name is also William Delaney Trent. That shared name links father and son even as the household uses familiar names to distinguish them. The family’s self-presentation is affectionate and secure, though later scenes show that its closeness does not mean William welcomes every choice made by his daughter.

The Household, Ranch, and Changing Texas

The family’s seasons are divided between school in winter and freedom on the ranch in summer. Their grandfather had established the ranch as a pioneer; in the children’s earlier years, unfenced land and stray cattle still belonged to its landscape. By the time Anne Elizabeth was in high school, the land had been fenced and a macadam road was being built from Dallas. These changes make the family’s history a small measure of Texas’s material development, from open ranch country toward improved roads and easier travel.

William’s own habits change alongside that landscape. He once rode Mullah, a fine Arabian stallion given to him by a stockman who could not pay his legal fee. Later he went everywhere in a Ford rather than on the horse. The episode ties his professional standing to everyday life: his legal work has value even when a client cannot settle an account in money, and the resulting gift becomes part of the family’s story. Anne Elizabeth, meanwhile, has a cream-colored pony named Coffee, who paws and nods when he wants sugar. Her wish for a car, shared with her brothers, marks the children’s impatience with their father’s old vehicle and their attention to what other girls possess.

Paternal Affection and Protection

William’s tenderness is clearest in the account of Anne Elizabeth as the belle of a ball. Emma brings home town gossip praising her, and Anne Elizabeth blushes happily. William touches the top of his daughter’s hand and affirms that he had thought the same, while allowing that a father might be prejudiced. The small gesture and his gentle qualification make his pride explicit without turning the scene into a grand declaration. His affection is part of ordinary family conversation, not only something revealed under crisis.

That care takes a more urgent form when William becomes seriously ill. A telegram first says he is coming at once and instructs the family to make no statement until he arrives; a later message reports that he is seriously ill and tells Anne Elizabeth to return and have Ada Washburn retain the best lawyer available. The first instruction’s precise referent is not explained in the passage, but the messages together convey a family emergency and the importance William attaches to securing legal help. Anne Elizabeth sets out by train, frightened by the news. At St. Louis she learns that his condition is fair and that he has double pneumonia. Buster meets her when she reaches home and tells her she has nearly killed their father, a family remark that registers both concern and the intensity of her return.

Illness, War News, and Recovery

At the house, Dr. Winslow promises that he will pull William through. Anne Elizabeth is distressed by her father’s restless, flushed appearance and dislikes finding a trained nurse in charge of the household. The passage presents her reaction through her attachment to the familiar home: illness has brought outside care into a space associated with her father’s authority and family routines. It does not suggest that the nurse is at fault; the discomfort belongs to Anne Elizabeth’s experience of the altered household.

Later, after a sleepless night, Anne Elizabeth drives to Dallas through a fall landscape of dry corn and red and yellow hills. William is sitting up in his pajamas and bathrobe, reading war news. He believes the Hindenburg Line is crumbling and that the American soldiers will succeed now that they have begun. His attention to the front places his private recovery within the larger wartime moment. Anne Elizabeth heats canned soup, and the two share supper and read a funny letter from Buster at Camp Merritt, where his outfit is waiting to go overseas. Their quiet meal restores, for a time, the intimacy of their earlier home life, even as the letter keeps the war present at the table.

Conflict over Relief Work

When Anne Elizabeth tells the family that she has signed up to spend six months overseas with Near East Relief, William is furious. The war is over, and Buster argues that she should stay home. William’s opposition is therefore concrete: he objects to his daughter leaving for relief work after the fighting has ended, while she regards service as a duty owed to those who gave their lives. She insists that she can give six months to the work. Her decision shifts the family scene from an effort to cheer everyone through dinner to a disagreement about what responsibility demands after war.

The family falls quiet when Anne Elizabeth’s argument brings Bud to mind. The passage does not elaborate on that moment, but its placement connects her appeal to sacrifice with a loss already known to the family. William’s anger and the silence that follows show the cost of her choice without resolving their disagreement. He remains a loving father whose instinct is to keep his daughter at home, but his daughter’s actions carry her beyond the household’s protection and into a public relief effort. Through him, domestic affection and patriotic commitment meet not as simple agreement, but as competing claims on Anne Elizabeth’s future.