After the Dancing Days is the story of Annie Metcalf and her family, who live in Kansas City, Kansas, at the end of World War I. Annie's father, Larry, has served as a physician at a military hospital in New York City during the war. He returns to find Annie a more mature young lady of thirteen. Annie adapts to her father's homecoming amidst her mother, Katherine's, refusal to acknowledge the war or its horrible aftermath. Katherine's brother and Annie's favorite uncle, Paul, had died in the war; and Annie still struggles to accept that Uncle Paul is gone.