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Adventure I 

A Scandal In Bohemia 



i 




O Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him 
mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and pre- 
dominates 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, but 
as a lover he would have placed himself in a false 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 such intrusions into his own delicate and finely ad- 
justed temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt 
upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his 
own high-power lenses, would not 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 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, while Holmes, who loathed every form 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 powers of observation in following out 
those clues, and clearing up those mysteries which had been abandoned as hopeless 
by the official police. From time to time I heard some vague account of his doings: 
of his summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, of his clearing up 
of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee, and finally of the