But my mind had long been travelling in an inverse direction to his.

And far too large a number of my contemporaries distinguished and undistinguished have been moving in the same direction for it to be at all necessary to say that most assuredly my slowly maturing convictions were neither generated nor fostered by any "graciousness" or other influence of dukes or duchesses or great people of any sort.
That my mother's political ideas were in no degree "an affair of the heart," I will not say, and by no means regret not being able to say.
But I cannot but assert that it is a great mistake to say that they were uninfluenced by "reasoning from causes," or that the movement of her mind in this respect was in any degree whatever due to the caresses which my brother imagines to have caused it.
She was not a great or careful preserver of papers and letters, or I might have been able to print here very many communications from persons in whom the world feels an interest.

Among her early and very dear friends was Mary Mitford.
I have a very vivid remembrance of the appearance of Mary Russell Mitford as I used to see her on the occasions of my visits to Reading, where my grandfather's second wife and then widow was residing.

She was not corpulent, but her figure gave one the idea of almost cubical solidity.

She had a round and red full moon sort of face, from the ample forehead above which the hair was all dragged back and stowed away under a small and close-fitting cap, which surrounding her face increased the effect of full-blown rotundity.