This précis of the feminine ideal marks the beginning of Colette’s since-famous dissection of women’s emotional psychology. The second volume carries Claudine through the year—her seventeenth—which her father decides must be spent in Paris, ostensibly in the interests of his scientific work, but actually with an eye to widening her circle of acquaintance. Sick with nostalgia for her native Montigny and loathing every aspect of her urban imprisonment, Claudine succumbs to a long illness which has two important results. Her hair must be cropped, and her contacts are confined to her father’s older sister and the latter’s grandson, a pretty creature of her own age as effeminate as she is boyish. Very nearly disliking Marcel, Claudine still feels a physical attraction much like that which drew her to Luce. But Marcel’s emotions are absorbed in an affair with a male schoolmate—an affair which has made trouble for both boys at their Lycée and evoked the wrath and contempt of Marcel’s father. Evasive about his own experiences, Marcel is avidly curious about Claudine’s relations with Luce (pride prevents her mentioning Aimée). It is Marcel who sees the modish possibilities in Claudine’s cropped head, and takes her to an English tailor to be outfitted _en garçonne_, a style eminently suited to her both physically and psychologically. During her illness Claudine has heard from Luce that her situation at the school has become intolerable and she is ready for desperate measures. Presently she meets Luce on a Paris street dressed more smartly than she is herself, and learns that the girl, who had sought help from an uncle (a gross sixty-year-old widower), is now being lavishly kept by him. Nevertheless, Luce manages to have a boy-friend from the Beaux-Arts on the side, and is also eager to resume relations with Claudine. The latter, too, feels the earlier attraction, but realizes she cannot tolerate intimacy with a little _grue_ who is living with her own uncle. With humorous honesty she admits to herself that despite having “read everything—and understood it” before she was sixteen, when it comes to “real life” she is nothing but “an ordinary good girl.” In the course of her acquaintance with the pretty Marcel she meets Renaud, the latter’s widowed father, and is drawn to him despite his intolerance of his son’s homosexual affair. She thinks he is just the man she would have chosen for a father—urbane and witty, but with sombre emotional depths. Soon she is in love with him. The man, twenty years her senior, struggles against a reciprocal attraction, but Claudine’s headlong infatuation wins, and the book ends with their engagement.