It was late in June of my twenty-third year, and exactly twelve months after my graduation into the world of chemistry, that my father called me into his study, one morning as I was about to leave for the laboratory.
"Sit down, Ted," he said. "I've got some news for you."
I sat down hopefully, wondering if at last he had recognized that I was very unhappy over my chemistry.
"Possibly," I thought, "I shall be relieved and allowed to take up writing."
"What do you say to a run over to New York to look at some new business that has cropped up there? I'm thinking of sailing Saturday and taking you with me."
I was disappointed, but there seemed nothing alarming in the suggestion, so I readily agreed.
My mother and sister saw us off at Euston, with old Sims curtseying in the background and Chitty saluting in military fashion.
On the way over my father walked the decks many hours with me and told me of all his business hopes and fears. He had got together all his available capital and was contemplating investing it in an American plant. The company was to be organized in London, with an American branch, and he was looking forward to putting me, ultimately, at the head of the whole thing. Meanwhile the new company had to be built up and to fight its own way against competition. We were to consider, in New York, what he regarded as a favourable offer of a factory which had been made him.
Although I had been in and out of New York many times while an undergraduate at Hilltown, I could never get over a feeling of strange awe at its noise and confusion. In London I was at home; in New York I felt alien and wondered how anybody could feel as if he belonged there. "Luckily," I thought, as we rode down-town on the elevated, "we shan't be here long." I had a return steamer ticket for Liverpool in an inside pocket. It was a question of closing a business transaction and returning.