At Melchester

The human interest of the new intention--and a human interest is
indispensable to the most spiritual and self-sacrificing--was created
by a letter from Sue, bearing a fresh postmark. She evidently
wrote with anxiety, and told very little about her own doings, more
than that she had passed some sort of examination for a Queen's
Scholarship, and was going to enter a training college at Melchester
to complete herself for the vocation she had chosen, partly by his
influence. There was a theological college at Melchester; Melchester
was a quiet and soothing place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its
tone; a spot where worldly learning and intellectual smartness had no
establishment; where the altruistic feeling that he did possess would
perhaps be more highly estimated than a brilliancy which he did not.

As it would be necessary that he should continue for a time to work
at his trade while reading up Divinity, which he had neglected at
Christminster for the ordinary classical grind, what better course
for him than to get employment at the further city, and pursue this
plan of reading? That his excessive human interest in the new place
was entirely of Sue's making, while at the same time Sue was to be
regarded even less than formerly as proper to create it, had an
ethical contradictoriness to which he was not blind. But that much
he conceded to human frailty, and hoped to learn to love her only as
a friend and kinswoman.