noon
Daniel then straining to discern something in that early twilight , had a dim sense of having been kissed very much , and surrounded by thin , cloudy , scented drapery , till his fingers caught in something hard , which hurt him , and he began to cry . Every other memory he had was of the little world in which he still lived . And at that time he did not mind about learning more , for he was too fond of Sir Hugo to be sorry for the loss of unknown parents . Life was very delightful to the lad , with an uncle who was always indulgent and cheerful -- a fine man in the bright noon of life , whom Daniel thought absolutely perfect , and whose place was one of the finest in England , at once historical , romantic , and home-like : a picturesque architectural outgrowth from an abbey , which had still remnants of the old monastic trunk . Diplow lay in another county , and was a comparatively landless place which had come into the family from a rich lawyer on the female side who wore the perruque of the restoration ; whereas the Mallingers had the grant of Monk 's Topping under Henry the Eighth , and ages before had held the neighboring lands of King 's Topping , tracing indeed their origin to a certain Hugues le Malingre , who came in with the Conqueror -- and also apparently with a sickly complexion which had been happily corrected in his descendants . Two rows of these descendants , direct and collateral , females of the male line , and males of the female , looked down in the gallery over the cloisters on the nephew Daniel as he walked there : men in armor with pointed beards and arched eyebrows , pinched ladies in hoops and ruffs with no face to speak of ; grave-looking men in black velvet and stuffed hips , and fair , frightened women holding little boys by the hand ; smiling politicians in magnificent perruques , and ladies of the prize-animal kind , with rosebud mouths and full eyelids , according to Lely ; then a generation whose faces were revised and embellished in the taste of Kneller ; and so on through refined editions of the family types in the time of Reynolds and Romney , till the line ended with Sir Hugo and his younger brother Henleigh . This last had married Miss Grandcourt , and taken her name along with her estates , thus making a junction between two equally old families , impaling the three Saracens ' heads proper and three bezants of the one with the tower and falcons _ argent _ of the other , and , as it happened , uniting their highest advantages in the prospects of that Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt who is at present more of an acquaintance to us than either Sir Hugo or his nephew Daniel Deronda .