The second line of Before Completion (King Wen 64) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as dragging back the wheels of his carriage, firm correctness brings good fortune. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and success, like a young fox that has almost crossed the stream when its tail gets wet, so there is no advantage in any direction yet, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.
Structurally the line stands at the middle place of the lower trigram Kan, water in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Li, fire in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads fire above water; the superior man carefully discriminates among the qualities of things and the positions they naturally occupy, and the second line takes its place inside that combined picture of Kan below and Li above.
Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Kan is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Dragging Back the Wheels of His Carriage, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.