Mad Barbara by Warwick Deeping

For a girl to maintain her dignity in some such assemblage as that at the house of Hortense, she needed a glib tongue, an easy temper, and no prejudices with regard to the inviolate sanctity of her lips or cheek. The gentlemen of fashion had renounced the central superstition of Chivalry, while retaining some of its outward pageantry and splendor. Cynics and worldlings, they had no real reverence for woman, no belief in her honor, and little consideration for her name. She was merely a thing to be coveted, to be maligned, or to be made, perhaps, the butt of the bitterest and most unmanly ridicule. How mean and utterly contemptible those splendid gentlemen of the court could be, Anne Hyde had learned in the days before she became a duchess. So many noble fellows conspiring to swear away a woman's honor, and fabricating unclean lies about her, in the belief they would please a prince.

Barbara remained isolated by the window, studying the scene with an expression of sulky scorn. It was her first glimpse of the gadflies of the court; their methods of attack and of torture were to her things unknown. Many of the men had prematurely aged features, harsh skins, and unhealthy eyes. Some two or three were palpably the worse for wine. And despite their rich clothes and the beauty of mere surface refinement, they brought an atmosphere of unwholesome insolence into the Italian's salon-an insolence that made such true aristocrats as John Evelyn despair of the courts of kings.