The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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.

在歇洛克·福尔摩斯眼里，她永远是“那位女士”。我极少听他用别的名字提起过她。在她面前，她整个性别的其他女人全都黯然失色，退居其后。这倒不是说他对艾琳·艾德勒怀有什么类似于爱情的情感。一切情感，尤其是爱情，对于他那冷静、严谨而又极其协调平衡的头脑而言，都是格格不入的。依我看，他是世人所见过的最完美的推理与观察机器；但若是作为情人，他就会把自己置于极不恰当的位置了。他谈起温柔的激情时，从无例外不是冷嘲热讽。对观察者来说，那些情感倒是极好的东西——极有助于揭开人们动机与行为的面纱。然而，对于受过严谨训练的推理者来说，任由这种干扰侵入自己细腻而精准调节的心性，就等于引入了一个分散注意力的因素，可能会使他所有的心智成果都受到怀疑。即便是一粒细砂落入灵敏的仪器，或是一道裂痕出现在他自己的高倍放大镜上，其干扰程度也不会超过强烈的情感出现在他这种性格的人身上。然而，对他来说，女人只有一位，那就是已故的艾琳·艾德勒，一位留下了难以捉摸而又令人生疑的回忆的女士。