Godolphin, Volume V by Edward Bulwer-lytton

While in scenes like these, alternated with more refined and polished dissipation, Godolphin lavished away his life, Constance, became more and more powerful as one of the ornaments of a great political party. Few women in England ever mixed more actively in politics than Lady Erpingham, or with more remarkable ability. Her friends were out of office, it is true; but she saw the time approaching rapidly when their opinions must come into power. She bad begun to love, for itself, the scheming of political ambition, and in any country but England she would have been a conspirator, and in old times might have risen to be a queen; but as it was, she was only a proud, discontented woman. She knew, too, that it was all she could be -- all that her sex allowed her to be -- yet did she not the less straggle and toil on.

The fate of her father still haunted her; her promise and his death-bed still rose oft and solemnly before leer; the humiliations she had known in her early condition -- the homage that had attended her later career -- still cherished in her haughty soul indignation at the faction he had execrated, and little less of the mighty class which that faction represented. The system of "fashion" she had so mainly contributed to strengthen, and which was originally by her intended to build up a standard of opinion, independent of mere rank, and in defiance of mere wealth, she saw polluted and debased by the nature of its followers, into a vulgar effrontery, which was worse than the more quiet dulness it had attempted to supplant. Yet still she was comforted by the thought that through this system lay the way to more wholesome changes. The idols of rank and wealth once broken, she believed that a pure and sane worship must ultimately be established.