Cub's extra year in Cambridge had clearly paid political dividends, and before the end of 1935 it gave him the opportunity for some more foreign travel. As one of two Cambridge Union representatives he sailed from Southampton for the United States on 23 October. They were leaving for a six-week speaking tour of universities in the East; also on board were two Oxford men, on a similar mission to the western states.

At twenty-three Cub was already a seasoned traveller, and the journal which he managed to keep for much of this trip betrays no special sense of excitement. His father's reaction was quite different. On the pretext of illustrating the contrast between Cub's journey and the voyage to Vancouver undertaken by his own father seventy-two years before, Cecil provides a star-struck account for readers of The House of Curious. Admittedly it was relevant to point out that Cub's journey, on the Berengaria, had taken only six days compared with the five months endured by Arthur Alport in 1863, but it was less justifiable to allude to the cocktail party which Cub and his fellow students threw for their fellow-passengers in 1935. As Cecil breathlessly reported, among the guests were “Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British Ambassador to Washington; Aubrey Smith, the cinema star, and other distinguished persons”.

In fact Cub's diary records no other revellers “distinguished” enough to be named, and clearly both he and his father were more interested in two guests who were too seasick to turn up – the “two beautiful and famous young ladies from Hollywood, Merle Oberon and Tilly Losch, laid low” as Cecil put it, “by an unchivalrous and angry sea”.