To Sherlock Holmes she is always 'the woman.' He never speaks of her other than under that denomination. In his eyes she eclipses the weaker sex in its entirety. Don’t believe however that he had love, even affection for Irene Adler. All violent sentiments, and that one particularly, were contradictory to his cold, methodical, and admirably balanced character.

Holmes is truly the animated observing machine the most perfected that one may encounter; but I do not see my character in the role of a suitor.* He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a scornful jest and a mocking smile. For he who has the mission to observe and deduce, the passion among others is a powerful assistance; It ceaselessly determines the secret motives which have brought the accused to his crime.

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 teasoner 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.