So Well Remembered by James Hilton

sentence.
    “No, I’ll know where to go.”
    “In the drawing-room, I think. That’s where he was.”
    Livia then went in without another word, while Mr. Standon, after staring
at her retreating figure for a moment, slowly lit a cigarette and began to
walk down the drive-way towards the road, quickening his pace when he heard
the horn a fourth time. He still felt extremely uncomfortable.
* * * * *
    The lights throughout the house were unlit, but a
flickering glow, as of
firelight, showed beneath the drawing-room door where the carpet had worn;
everything else was dark, except the high window at the end of the corridor,
which showed the dawn in a grey oblong, Livia turned the door-handle and
entered. Her eyes were dazzled at first by the firelight, but she was somehow
aware of a person in the room.
    “I can’t SEE you,” she said—the first words she ever spoke to
him.
    She saw then a tall shape striding across the floor to the light- switch;
next she saw his shoulders, a little stooping; then, when he turned, all such
details as his grey thinning hair, wide forehead, and odd smile merged into a
general first impression that he was TIRED.
    “Livia, isn’t it?”
    “Hello,” she answered; and they shook hands.
    When one is young, everything has a stereoscopic clarity, even if it is
not properly understood; no hoard of experience both makes and compensates
for a blurred background. To Livia as she shook hands with the stranger who
was her father, it seemed that her life hinged in a new direction,
terrifyingly new, puzzling, even shattering, yet somehow not to be feared.
But for the moment she thought her mind would break with such a mixture of
emotions as she began to feel: angry love for her mother, cold dislike for
Mr. Standon, and a growing shock over the entire situation, as if her
physical existence were coming out of numbness. I shall never be the same
again, because NOTHING can ever be the same again, and I am not NOTHING
—she reflected suddenly, remembering the first lesson in logic that had
been almost the last thing she learned at Cheldean. But the frantic syllogism
comforted her, all the more because it had not occurred to her till just that
moment; and as she stared from the firelight to the tired face of the man
standing before her, she repeated it to herself: Whatever happens, whatever
they do to me, however much I am torn apart, I AM NOT NOTHING.
    She saw that he was still smiling, waiting perhaps for her to speak. She
wondered how long she had been silent—minutes or only seconds? But the
words could come now; she began abruptly: “Are you hungry? I am.”
    He answered: “Not very. But don’t let me stop you—”
    “Wouldn’t you even like a cup of tea?”
    “Well… er… hadn’t we better wait till Sarah—”
    “Oh, I’ll make it. Let’s go into the kitchen.”
    “All right.”
    She made not only a cup of tea, but a substantial meal of eggs and bacon,
which they both ate, talking of nothing in particular meanwhile—just
the weather, and the sharp frost that morning, and how they liked their eggs
done. It was beginning to be easier now—like the first morning of term
when you go into a new class with a new teacher, and you do not exactly
expect to get on with her at first—in fact you pine for the old one all
the time, though you would not, if the choice were given, stay down in the
lower class just to escape the trials of newness.
    When he lit a pipe she commented: “They said you never used to smoke.”
    He did not ask who ‘they’ were, or why the matter should ever have been
mentioned. He answered lightly: “Oh yes, I have most bad habits.”
    “You mean you drink too?”
    “Well… I HAVE been known to touch a drop.”
    She laughed, because the phrase ‘touch a drop’ had amused her when she was
a child; it was so funny to touch a drop, if you ever went to the trouble of
doing it, and she had often in those days puzzled over why