heet of paper, on which I had jotted down
my most telling qualifications, and with a stub of blue pencil
regretfully but firmly biffed out item No 1, Organising Ability.

I next approached the firm of Walbrook Bros., armed with a letter
from a man who had once belonged to the same golf-club as the senior
Walbrook brother.

"I can't read your friend's name," said this magnate, "but whoever he
is he seems to think that you are the sort of man who might be useful
in my business. What can you do?" and he leaned back patiently in his
chair, finger-tips to finger-tips, but with all the appearance of one
ready to pounce at my first weak statement.

"For the best part of four years," I began, "I have been living in
France, and----"

He pounced. "Ah, French! I thought so. Now if you had said Spanish, or
even Russian ..."

He frowned as the thought crossed his mind that I might yet say either
of them. But I didn't, and he was free to expatiate on the alleged
advantages of Spanish and a sound commercial education. The end was
that I found myself once more in the street, this time erasing the
word "Languages" from my dwindling list.

And so it went on. Mr. Hall, of the firm of Copt and Basing Hall,
begged me not to speak of any capacity I might possess for controlling
men. (Item No. 3: Disciplinary Power and Habit of Command.) He himself
was able to do all the controlling that his staff would be likely to
require. Mr. Throgmorton, managing director of the firm of Capel Sons
and Threadneedle, Ltd., hoped at the outset that I would not speak of
my mathematical proficiency. Many men were inclined to make a fetish
of mathematics. He feared I might be one of them from the fact that I
had begun to speak of (item No. 4) the tabulation and co-ordination of
statistics.

After a week of this sort of thing I had acquired nothing but
experience, and my experience now gave me an idea. I drew up a new
list of important firms to which I had received no introductions
at all, and selected one which I knew was presided over by a man
of almost world-wide fame. Taking my courage and nothing else in my
hands, I entered the inquiry-office.

"Slip, please," I said briskly to the youth behind the counter, and he
handed me the customary form. Disregarding the spaces to be filled in,
I scribbled diagonally across the paper the name of the great man,
and wrote underneath: "Have called in passing, and cannot stay many
minutes."

This I signed and