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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Contents
I.
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
I.
To Sherlock Holmes sheis always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any othername. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It wasnot that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, andthat one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirablybalanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observingmachine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself ina false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and asneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawingthe veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner toadmit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament wasto introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mentalresults. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his ownhigh-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in anature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman wasthe late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from eachother. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise uparound the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, weresufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form ofsociety with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street,buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaineand ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keennature. He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, andoccupied his immense faculties and extraordinar