XIII
CALLED HOME
The spring that Hugh and Letty moved into their new house, Floyd Halket went abroad; of the subsequent developments in which Stewart Lee was concerned he knew nothing. The purpose of his trip was to establish if possible a foreign market for the company's steel and to pick up in England and Germany fresh ideas about the manufacture. He spent a month of hard work in Birmingham, and then, feeling that he had accomplished all that was possible, he declared a vacation and joined three of his college friends on a walking trip through the Lake Country; then they went on up into Scotland; and after two weeks there, Floyd's companions insisted that he should not desert them, but should go with them to Paris, and then through Touraine and Brittany. They were over for three months to have a good time; and Floyd, who had hardly taken a vacation since leaving college, yielded to their entreaties. He had almost forgotten what fun it was to be an irresponsible young fellow with congenial idle companions, and he surprised his old friends by his spontaneous gayety. "You're more of a boy than you used to be," one of them said to him seriously. He stayed with the party until October, and then went to Southampton to see them off on the steamer; they had a tremendous dinner together, at the end of which Floyd sang "Fair Harvard" many times over and declared his belief that nothing but prejudice and personal animosity had kept him off the Glee Club in college.
A week later he was in Germany, visiting iron mills and gun factories, studying methods, making notes; for
