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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, 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 adjusted 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 mission which he had accomplished so
delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland.
Beyond these signs of his activity, however, which I merely shared
with all the readers of the daily press, I knew little of my former
friend and companion.

One night--it was on the twentieth of March, 1888--I was returning
from a journey to a patient (for I had now returned to civil
practice), when my way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the
well-remembered door, which must always be associated in my mind with
my wooing, and with the dark incidents of the Study in Scarlet, I was
seized with a keen desire to see Holmes again, and to know how he was
employing his extraordinary powers. His rooms were brilliantly lit,
and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice in
a dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the room swiftly,
eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped
behind him. To me, who knew his every mood and habit, his attitude
and manner told their own story. He was at work again. He had risen
out of his drug-created dreams and was hot upon the scent of some new
problem. I rang the bell and was shown up to the chamber which had
formerly been in part my own.

His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think,
to see me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved
me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a
spirit case and a gasogene in the corner. Then he stood before the
fire and looked me over in his singular introspective fashion.

"Wedlock suits you," he remarked. "I think, Watson, that you have put
on seven and a half pounds since I saw you."

"Seven!" I answered.

"Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I
fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me
that you intended to go into harness."

"Then, how do you know?"

"I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting
yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and
careless servant girl?"

"My dear Holmes," said I, "this is too much. You would certainly have
been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that I had
a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I
have changed my clothes I can't imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary
Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice, but
there, again, I fail to see how you work it out."

He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.

"It is simplicity itself," said he; "my eyes tell me that on the
inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the
leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have
been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the
edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you
see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and
that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the
London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my
rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver
upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his
top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be
dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the
medical profession."

I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his
process of deduction. "When I hear you give your reasons," I
remarked, "the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously
simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive
instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your
process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours."

"Quite so," he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself
down into an armchair. "You see, but you do not observe. The
distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps
which lead up from the hall to this room."

"Frequently."

"How often?"

"Well, some hundreds of times."

"Then how many are there?"

"How many? I don't know."

"Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just
my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have
both seen and observed. By-the-way, since you are interested in these
little problems, and since you are good enough to chronicle one or
two of my trifling experiences, you may be interested in this." He
threw over a sheet of thick, pink-tinted note-paper which had been
lying open upon the table. "It came by the last post," said he. "Read
it aloud."

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