A determined young man from a rural background aspires to university study but is repeatedly thwarted by class barriers, personal relationships, and rigid institutions. He becomes involved with a complex, free-thinking woman and later endures an unhappy domestic arrangement that undermines his goals. The story tracks successive episodes of hope, compromise, and despair while probing marriage, religion, education, and the law. Structured in linked parts that move between village, cathedral city, and provincial towns, the narrative shows how social conventions and intimate failures combine to frustrate an individual's intellectual and emotional ambitions.