Page:The principal girl (IA principalgirl00snai).pdf/261

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  • bassador with great sincerity, and went his way along

Pall Mall; and as he did this he was just the happiest young man in all the great Metropolis. It was a genuine inspiration that Mary should make the speeches. He would attend to the goal-kicking department all right. He would go into strict training, knock off tobacco, lead the life of an anchorite. And when he found himself in Parliament as a full-blown Rag, he would be able to say that she had done it all.

Hitherto Mr. Philip had not been encumbered with anything so superfluous as political convictions. He had known in a dim kind of way that the friends of his youth had been Waggers. Without the Waggers, he had always been given to understand there would have been no turn-up with the Boers in South Africa. He had borne a humble part in that little affair, along with the rest of his friends; and the best he could say for it was that he had found it rather an overrated amusement. But without the Waggers, so he understood, there would not have been fair play for everybody.

However, this was the only good thing he knew about the Waggers. His father was a Wagger, of course, like everybody else's father was; but if you have quarrelled with your father, there is all the less reason to stick to the same school of political thought. But Mary it was who had really converted him, and had made