One day I waited outside a great bank, one of a seething crowd of many hundreds, in momentary expectation that the doors would be closed, but the minutes and the hours passed, and as four o’clock approached it became known that the danger had been averted. Many similar scenes were to be witnessed at that time, but, although they provided me with excitement enough and to spare, even these vivid incidents in the career into which I had been thrust did not induce me to swerve from the resolution I had already secretly formed, not to remain in the City when the days of my apprenticeship were concluded. I think, however, that, notwithstanding the distaste I had for my work, I performed my task zealously enough. So, indeed, it must have been, for when I finally announced to the firm my intention to retire, one of the partners asked me to reconsider my decision, holding out to me the inducement that if I would remain till I was twenty-one there would be a good prospect of my being promoted to a junior partnership. But my choice had already been made, and I was in no mind to change it. Still secretly nursing the thought of a literary career, it was, nevertheless, clear to me that, for the time at any rate, I must adopt a more definite occupation. I therefore made up my mind to study for the Bar. My only trouble was to know how to announce this decision to my dear father, who had spent his hardly-earned money in giving me this first and great chance in the world, and to whom I knew the resolution at which I had arrived would be a source of bitter disappointment and regret. And so, indeed, it was! But he was the widest-minded and the most liberal-hearted of men, and, when at last I found the courage to break it to him, he hardly allowed me to perceive the deep disappointment which I knew he was suffering. For my own part I have never regretted those days passed in the City, though at the time I felt them to be barren and wasted. Perhaps I learned as much as I should have acquired at Cambridge, though it was learning of a different sort. Some knowledge of men I certainly gained, some knowledge also of the habit of work which no career, however detached from business, can afford to dispense with. Certainly, if there had not been some such obstacle in my path, I should not have thrown myself into the life I had chosen with the same keenness and persistence. The opposition which these earlier years set in the way of the calling I most wanted to pursue nerved and stiffened my resolution. I did a prodigious amount of reading in those late nights after the strenuous days in the City, and I think the fact that I had broken away from the life that was laid out for me gave me a higher courage to try and succeed in the life of my own choosing.