This Marrying by Margaret Culkin Banning

To Horatia the affair was immensely serious, but, Langley's attitude in _The Journal_ office the next morning, though anxious, was not yet gravely troubled. According to reason he should have been right, what had jarred between him and Horatia was nothing after all, but in fact it was Horatia who gauged the dangers of the situation correctly. What she herself did not realize was that the episode about Mrs. Hubbell was one which only added another fear and another doubt to the fears and doubts which already had invaded her mind, unacknowledged. And these fears and doubts were in the air of her generation. Her discovery about Grace had perhaps begun the uncertainty. Tricked once into belief in a person and deceived, she herself had learned to feel suspicion and fear. She had learned that the men about her were not necessarily faithful to their wives and try as she would to put the thought out of her mind it crept back sometimes while she was talking to this man or that. Langley had reassured her -- had made her smile again -- events had driven the memory of Grace out of her mind -- but the stain remained, corroding the faith and beauty of her feeling for Jim more than she guessed. There had been the doubts created by her fears about money matters and as to whether she and Jim would be able to keep themselves orderly and happy on their income. There had been the fear of the pain of marriage as she hovered at the door of the little sick child in her sister's house. These things once accepted as the lot of woman became a problem now that they were a choice and not a lot.

Subtly too, the temptations of the luxury of the life of the married women whom she met around Mrs. Clapp had dulled the edge of her own desire to work after she married. And Horatia had found no anchor philosophical or sociological. She was one of those who drifted with people rather than with causes and it was a hard age into which she had come to maturity. She could not like so many contemporary women fling herself into a cause and put the cause (or pretend to put it) before all personal life, and yet she could not, like her grandmother, fling herself into the institution of matrimony and expect the institution to solve her problems. Her faith in marriage with Jim was a structure subtly undermined by the conditions surrounding her and upheld only by one great and mighty prop -- the prop of faith in Jim. Jim would adjust the problem of how they should live -- Jim would keep them from stupidity and shabbiness -- against the furtiveness of the married scoundrel who sought illicit relations, Jim stood, magnificent in his love for her. Everywhere he supported her, held her up, made her strong. And then this had come, this little thing which had curiously grown into a big thing.