Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner.
You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid."
"But the romance was there," I remonstrated. "I could not tamper with the facts."
"Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it."
I was annoyed at this criticism of a work which had been specially designed to please him.
I confess, too, that I was irritated by the egotism which seemed to demand that every line of my pamphlet should be devoted to his own special doings.
More than once during the years that I had lived with him in Baker Street I had observed that a small vanity underlay my companion's quiet and didactic manner.
I made no remark however, but sat nursing my wounded leg.
I had had a Jezaii bullet through it some time before, and though it did not prevent me from walking it ached wearily at every change of the weather.
"My practice has extended recently to the Continent," said Holmes after a while, filling up his old brier-root pipe.