Why the devil was my husband positively grinning - and with what looked remarkably like relief?

The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era.

Only the careless leave a possibility unattended due to assumptions.

I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915.

When you're putting together a story, sometimes you just have to skip over the boring bits.

You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.

But a topee is not a turban, and I had been my teacher's pupil before I became my husband's wife, learning to my bones that half a disguise is none at all...The moment my short-cropped, pomade-sleek, unquestionably masculine hair passed beneath his nose was the closest thing I've ever seen Holmes to fainting dead away.