Dr. Watson comments on the afternoon’s mail to his flatmate, Sherlock Holmes:
“Here is a very fashionable epistle,” I remarked as he entered. “Your morning letters, if I remember right, were from a fish-monger and a tide-waiter.”
“Yes, my correspondence has certainly the charm of variety,” he answered, smiling, “and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.”
As a fellow introvert, I share Holmes’s annoyance with unwelcome social summonses. I have more than once been bored at a social occasion I was expected to attend, and I have been known to lie to get out of events I don’t want to go to.
(For the curious: a fish-monger sells fish, and a tide-waiter was a customs official who historically went aboard ships to oversee the collection of import duties and check for contraband.)
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor.” Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories. Vol. 1. New York: Bantam Books, 1986, 388-89.
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