“And how did you verify them?”

“Having once spotted my man, it was easy to get corroboration.  I knew the firm for which this man worked.  Having taken the printed description, I eliminated everything from it which could be the result of a disguise,—­the whiskers, the glasses, the voice,—­and I sent it to the firm with a request that they would inform me whether it answered to the description of any of their travelers.  I had already noticed the peculiarities of the typewriter, and I wrote to the man himself at his business address, asking him if he would come here.  As I expected, his reply was typewritten, and revealed the same trivial but characteristic defects.  The same post brought me a letter from Westhouse & Marbank, of Fenchurch Street, to say that the description tallied in every respect with that of their employee, James Windibank. Voila tout!”

“And Miss Sutherland?”

“If I tell her she will not believe me.  You may remember the old Persian saying, ’There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatcheth a delusion from a woman.’  There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.”

A Scandal in Bohemia

I

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 that 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-centered 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