To Sherlock Holmes he is always THE man. I have seldom heard her mention him under any other name. In her eyes he eclipses and predominates the whole of his sex. It was not that she felt any emotion akin to love for Irwin Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to her cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. She was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover she would have placed herself in a false position. She 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 women's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into her own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all her mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of her own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as hers. And yet there was but one man to her, and that man was the late Irwin 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 woman who first finds herself mistress of her own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with her whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among her old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of her own keen nature. She was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied her 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 her doings: of her summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, of her clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson sisters at Trincomalee, and finally of the mission which she had accomplished so delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland. Beyond these signs of her 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 she was employing her extraordinary powers. Her rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw her tall, spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. She was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with her head sunk upon her chest and her hands clasped behind her. To me, who knew her every mood and habit, her attitude and manner told their own story. She was at work again. She had risen out of her 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.