text stringlengths 0 74 |
|---|
THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES |
Arthur Conan Doyle |
Table of contents |
A Scandal in Bohemia |
The Red-Headed League |
A Case of Identity |
The Boscombe Valley Mystery |
The Five Orange Pips |
The Man with the Twisted Lip |
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle |
The Adventure of the Speckled Band |
The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb |
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor |
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet |
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches |
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA |
Table of contents |
Chapter 1 |
Chapter 2 |
Chapter 3 |
CHAPTER 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 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 |
End of preview. Expand
in Data Studio
No dataset card yet
- Downloads last month
- 6