The first German volume ends here, and the second opens in an unspecified large city, which in all probability actually represented another aspect of Berlin. There Metta, completely on her own, attempts to adjust to independent life. She plunges resolutely into solitary study, but without the incentive of discussion with Olga she finds the effort empty. Consequently she determines to “learn by living,” and allows herself to be drawn into a bohemian group, several members of which room in her own pension. Among these artists, journalists, and entertainers she finds a sexual freedom which profoundly shocks her, but laying the shock to her hitherto sheltered life, she refuses to withdraw, and shrugs off the half-maternal admonitions of a “respectable” coterie in the house. She is presently involved with a night club singer, Gisela, to whom she is drawn by learning that the girl’s obvious physical wasting and reputed drug addiction are the results of hopeless love for a woman. Their affair is essentially a matter of mutual physical assuagement, each girl being still in love with someone else. It is developed slightly more in the German volume than in the English _Scorpion_ of which it forms the second part, but is not seriously expurgated in the latter. A much more vital attachment begins between Metta and a handsome sculptress, Sophie, but is broken off by the latter because she has lived for years with an invalid who is completely dependent on her. This woman was Sophie’s salvation in a desperate period of her youth, and would give up the struggle to live if she felt herself no longer needed by her partner. Left essentially friendless by Sophie’s withdrawal, Metta drifts into a restless quest for diversion among the group of professional entertainers and homosexuals of whom Gisela is one. In the course of making a round of night clubs Metta becomes wretchedly ill from experimenting with cocaine, and recognizing amused contempt in the eyes of attractive strangers of the social class in which she was raised, she goes home filled with self-loathing to employ Olga’s cherished revolver and rejoin her lost love. She is checked by the ministrations of one of the “respectable” older women in the house, who confesses to a deep (though entirely innocent) affection for her, tells her she is too young to be knocking about alone, and sends her to stay with a sister in Hamburg whose husband is an alderman and whose daughter is a sheltered adolescent.