Holmes' diary, London 1895
Again and again her beauty strikes me as if I had never seen a woman or known what it is to admire the aesthetic. I have never spent much time in female company. It has not interested me. The fair sex has its qualities - a quick Intuition which belongs to woman alone - but I have always sought the intellectual, and bar one, no female has ever come close to offering that comfortable equanimity of mind and humour as I found in the company of men, that is, of my few friends.
Yet Watson - I write of her so familiarly here! - provides that ease and makes me wonder anew if there is a comfort in life which I have omitted to pursue. For bodily needs I am indifferent, but this close association of the mind draws me in. A marriage of true minds. Something my own Watson quoted, when the poetical mood took him and he would draw down his copy of the Sonnets and attempt to amuse me with them.
This lady's mind is true and clear. although she hides a secret I have still to discover. The secret is not, I am confident, any slur to her character. Rather I suspect she harbours an unnecessary burden of guilt for an act in which she played a part, one of many.
The clarity she brings! I awoke from a positive stupor of reflection last night and found her still sitting on the armchair opposite, her limbs drawn up into the chair so that she was curled like a squirrel around its nut, reading a book from the stack she has taken from my shelves. She noticed my movement, and looked across at me, and seeing me conscious, met my eye and smiled, and returned to her page.
One glance. A smile as slight as the glimmer of a coach lamp passing across a kerbside puddle. Yet at this one sign I felt the construction of my logic shift, and one brick slid aside to admit another, and I leapt up and cried, "The cat caught too many mice!" and catching up my hat and Ulster, hurried to the scene of the most vicious murder and a puzzle I had been troubled by for some hours. The dead mice in the cat's basket were a certain sign that someone kept a bird of prey and had a ready supply of small mammals with which to feed it. And a bird of prey might be trained to strike a man down if he wore a certain hat or coat.
When I returned home, the car resolved, Watson lay on the settee, quite asleep, her book on her breast, my travelling coat drawn about her for warmth.
I hesitated to leave her there, for the night was cold. I lay a hand gently on her shoulder and spoke her name. "The case is finished," I said, "and the murderer in the cells. You must take some credit for it, Watson," (how naturally the name came to my lips of long habit), "for you have the gift of patient silence which works marvels on my thought processes."
She rose sleepily and shook my hand to comgratulate me. "Next time take me with you," she mumbled.
I was startled. In an instant I realised that she had been waiting up for me, wishing to know the outcome of my case. Only her exhaustion had prevented her being alert and attentive on my return. "All right," I said, and there, as she slipped from the sitting room to her own chamber, was that glimmer of a smile.