The Mother's Recompense by Edith Wharton

Smoothness, Kate Clephane could see, was going to mark the first stage / of her re-embarkation on the waters of life. The truth came to her, / after that first evening, with the surprised discovery that the family / had refrained from touching on her past not so much from prudery, / or discretion even, as because such retrogressions were jolting / uncomfortable affairs, and the line of least resistance flowed forward, / not back. She had been right in guessing that her questions as to what / people thought of her past were embarrassing to Landers, but wrong in / the interpretation of his embarrassment. Like every one else about her, / he was caught up in the irresistible flow of existence, which somehow / reminded her less of a mighty river tending seaward than of a moving / stairway revolving on itself. "Only they all think it's a river. " / she mused.

But such thoughts barely lit on her tired mind and were gone. In the / first days, after she had grasped (without seeking its explanation) the / fact that she need no longer be on her guard, that henceforth there / would be nothing to conjure away, or explain, or disguise, her chief / feeling was one of illimitable relief. The rapture with which she / let herself sink into the sensation showed her for the first time how / tired she was, and for how long she had been tired. It was almost as / if this sense of relaxation were totally new to her, so far back did / her memory have to travel to recover a time when she had not waked to / apprehension, and fallen asleep rehearsing fresh precautions for the / morrow. In the first years of her marriage there had been the continual / vain effort to adapt herself to her husband's point of view, to her / mother-in-law's standards, to all the unintelligible ritual with which / they barricaded themselves against the alarming business of living. / After that had come the bitterness of her first disenchantment, and / the insatiable longing to be back on the nursery floor with Anne; / then, through all the ensuing years, the many austere and lonely / years, and the few consumed with her last passion, the ever-recurring / need of one form of vigilance or another, the effort to keep hold of / something that might at any moment slip from her, whether it were / her painfully-regained "respectability" or the lover for whom she / had forgone it. Yes; as she looked back, she saw herself always with / taut muscles and the grimace of ease; always pretending that she felt / herself free, and secretly knowing that the prison of her marriage had / been liberty compared with what she had exchanged it for.