Selected stories [antikvár]

HT o Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have J- seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to lőve for Irene Adler. Ali emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen; but, as a lover, he would have placed himself in a falsé position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer-excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit isuch intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mentái results. iGrit in a sensitive instrument; or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would no't be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable mernory. I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the homecentred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention; while Holmes, who loathed every forrn of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied his immense faculties and extraordinary 2-118 17