I don't know what certificates have come to mean nowadays, sometimes, I fear, very little. They seem to me to have lowered the standard with the utmost recklessness. I would not, in my own business, give a pound a dozen for some of these artificially achieved successes that are offered to me almost every day in the week, and it causes me no surprise whatever when I see the highly certificated also unemployed.... But it was rather different then. Once more I have forgotten my luck and railed at the goddess. It was my luck to be certificated while certificates still had a value, and for a year and a half I had drifted through my occupation by day but worked with an almost demoniac energy by night in order that I might not miss a single one of these tickets of authenticity that it was possible for me to obtain. A First Honours in Method would now complete my equipment. And, looking back now, I wonder how much superstition there was in it that I wanted all the changes I was planning to come at once. For I meant that the break, when it did come, should be clean and final. As long as I remained with Rixon Tebb & Masters' my wretched single room at King's Cross was quite good enough for an agency clerk; when I left Rixon Tebb & Masters' I would leave those quarters also. Until then, I don't think you could have dragged me out, so strongly had I this feeling. Superstition or what you like, it had, for me, the force of a large and wise, if not yet fully worked out strategy. They tried, of course, at the Business College in Holborn, just as they are now trying at the new place in Kingsway, to teach us this larger generalship of waiting, withholding, massing, concentration, and then the swift development and advance; but I don't think it was much good. You don't get these things in return for so many guineas a year in fees. But I felt their stirrings then.... I hope I have made it plain that neither at the place in Kingsway, nor in my sordid lodgings over the public-house, nor under the arches of Somers Town that night, was I wasting my time. And now, like a match to all that I had prepared and was preparing, had come the kindling thought of Evie Soames. I remember I walked to Hampstead that night, revolving it all. Walking always steadies me, and by the time I had reached the Lower Heath the mechanical calculators at the new place in Kingsway do not work more coldly and mathematically than my brain had begun to work. The advantages I possessed, which had been the first thing to rush into my head, I allowed for the present to take care of themselves; I now envisaged my disadvantages.