The Sign of Four (Sherlock Holmes, #2)

by Arthur Conan Doyle

“You really are an automaton—a calculating machine,” I cried. “There is something positively inhuman in you at times.”

she must be seven-and-twenty now—a sweet age, when youth has lost its self-consciousness and become a little sobered by experience.

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

I felt that years of the conventionalities of life could not teach me to know her sweet, brave nature as had this one day of strange experiences.

It was soothing to catch even that passing glimpse of a tranquil English home in the midst of the wild, dark business which had absorbed us.

“I would not tell them too much,” said Holmes. “Women are never to be entirely trusted—not the best of them.”

for white folk out there feel their hearts warm to each other as they never do here at home.

“For me,” said Sherlock Holmes, “there still remains the cocaine-bottle.”