Of the few lesbian novels to reach the United States one of the best was Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s three-volume _Scorpion_, which appeared in Germany between 1919 and 1921. It was translated a dozen years later in an abridged edition as two separate titles, _The Scorpion_ (1932) and _The Outcast_ (1933). Though slightly inferior in literary quality to _Marie Bonifas_, it shows equal mastery in accounting for and tracing the full history of an exclusively variant woman. The scene of Metta Rudloff’s childhood is a dreary city household consisting of her ineffectual father and a spiteful puritanic spinster aunt. Her care is entrusted to a nursery governess hired for no sounder reason than that the child takes an instant fancy to her. The young woman exhibits a facile affection which quickly enslaves her little charge, but her emotions are wholly bound to a cashiered military officer, who controls her completely and who alternately neglects her and lives on her bounty. To supply him with funds, she more than once pawns the Rudloff’s seldom-used family silver, employing Metta to secure it from its cupboard and taking her along on visits to the pawnbroker. When the misdemeanor is detected, the child is seriously involved, and the uncomprehended scandal, plus the loss of her beloved Fräulein, leaves a lasting scar. During puberty and adolescence Metta attends a public school, but her father’s snobbery discourages friendships with her mates, and she grows up a bored and lonely introvert. Nearing twenty, she meets, at the home of relatives, a handsome and enigmatic woman a decade her senior and falls violently in love with her. Soon she is spending most of her time in her new friend’s rooms in a pension, and she is spurred for the first time to real intellectual effort in order to keep up with Olga’s wide interests. (Among these is the life and work of Karoline von Günderode, for whom Olga has come to feel an almost mystic affinity which stirs Metta to jealous fury.) At the pension Metta also meets a Dr. Petermann, musical aesthete and cripple, who frequently plays his violin for the two young women.