"Your wife is an extraordinary woman," he said thoughtfully, as I left the table and gazed ashamed out of the window in considerable distress of mind, "generous and perceptive. She has seen what I imagined hidden, and is prepared to allow what I could hardly -"
"Holmes!" I cried. How could he speak so calmly? How could he be so cold?
How could I have treated my wife so? Had I not vowed to love and to cherish her until death?
"Yes, Watson?" he answered with evident surprise, "Do you not consider it a generous action? And a most intelligent method of making her plea... although several fewer hints would really have sufficed. But I have the greatest respect for your wife."
"Don't you understand?" I asked quietly, "She says that I... she says that I love you."
"Indeed," said Holmes, "which you do, and she renounces her claim upon you."
"You're so infernally calm," I began, although his coldness was making my pulse race as it always did, and the blood was rushing through me as it rarely had before, "you can't meant that there's nothing different between us, now that you know?"
"Watson, why do you persist in underestimating me? This is by no means news: subtlety is not one of your many talents. And no, there is nothing different between us... unless of course you wish there to be a change in our relationship. Sit down and have some more coffee."
"But... Mary..."
"If you want to return to your wife, then go!" He spoke dismissively, but was evidently piqued.
Mary had never stirred my blood like this. "No...," I whispered, hardly aware that I spoke. I couldn't leave this cold, beautiful, infuriating, fascinating man.
But that was a greater wrong! How could I stay to love a man? How could I have committed such sin as to love him?
"It is no sin," he said gently. He always read my mind.
"Then what is this guilt that I feel?"
"It is because you are what I happily am not: stubborn, conventional and puritanical. Perhaps that is why I love you."
Chapter 3