A Scandal in Bohemia

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have 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 love for Irene Adler. All 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.

And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory. I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention.

It was a January morning, and one of those pleasant mornings which, when it is not too hot, appear so much the colder. When I called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes, I found him in a state of unusual excitement, for he was pacing his sitting-room with long, nervous strides, and the whole of his face was convulsed in a way that was new to me. “My dear fellow,” said I, “you are not looking quite yourself.”