Legge renders the second line as the second nine, undivided, showing its subject treading a path that is level and easy, a quiet and solitary man to whom, if he remains firm and correct, good fortune belongs. Where the first line simply walked an accustomed course, this line adds a temperament to the walking, a preference for solitude and calm over the company and contest that Treading's central image, a tiger close enough to bite, might otherwise invite.
Nine in the second place holds the center of Dui, the lower trigram, and though a firm line in an even place is not counted as strictly correct by the usual rule of position, its centrality still grounds the good fortune the line promises. The level and easy path it describes is not the absence of the tiger above but a chosen distance from provoking it, a quiet man content with his own place rather than pressing forward to test himself against Qian's strength.
Set beside the third line's coming misfortune, this line's virtue is precisely its restraint. Legge's text ties the good fortune explicitly to firmness and correctness maintained in solitude, not to any achievement gained by advancing, which marks the second place as a model of safe conduct within a hexagram otherwise concerned with real danger.