"My word, Holmes, I don't know how you do it."

Watson laid his fingers over the back of Holmes's hand on his thigh. "My layers of respectibility are for the sake of my patients and my housekeeper, and other people who could not possibly handle bohemianism to any degree in a medical man," he said, dropping his thick irony to sound at least a little more serious. "You are not any of these things, and you see through my pretense, so I suppose that I may as well confess that it's all a farce."

He smoked silently for a moment. "Besides," he added, "respectable people generally do not hide out in abandoned houses at night with revolvers."