In this new milieu Metta is at first terrified lest she be followed by Gisela, but her fears prove groundless, and she is soon acting the model young lady, though she has need to guard her allusions to places recently frequented and uncensored books she read with Olga. She soon discovers that the daughter of the house is, beneath a seraphic exterior, as sophisticated as any of her late associates. The girl is carrying on an affair with a man twice her age whose charm briefly touches even Metta. She also constantly presses Metta to confess to lesbian tastes and experience, declaring that she “can always recognize the type,” and doing her best to seduce Metta by skillful caresses. This Hamburg interlude ends with a weekend trip on which Metta is supposedly Gwen’s chaperone. The fascinating man joins the expedition secretly, and proves a connoisseur of liquors and an adept at clandestine contrivance. In the girls’ room, Gwen, spurred by alcohol and the spring night, makes an unusually insistent play for Metta, but just as the latter is about to yield, the connecting door opens to admit the man, and she recognizes the whole trip as “a put up job” to seduce her into a party _à trois_. Utterly revolted, she makes a clean break with this life also, and searches further for some emotional stability and peace. The third German volume (of which _The Outcast_, in English, is a literal and complete translation) shows Metta in a mountain town where she has made no personal contacts and has told no one anything of herself or her past. Falling in love with the beauty of the region, she buys land and decides to build; consequently, she must go to Berlin for legal and architectural advice. There, renewing connections with the crippled Petermann, she meets in his pension a woman who reminds her strongly of Olga and who produces almost as instantaneous an emotional impact. Metta soon learns that this is the friend who originally gave Olga the scorpion cigaret case, and that it was Corona who terminated the association because she believes it is always better to end love while it is still beautiful than to let it die. Corona has not even known of Olga’s death until she sees the scorpion in Metta’s hands.