The Illustrious Client
I believe that whether you think of the Canon as the biographical work of Watson or the fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you must acknowledge The Adventure of the Illustrious Client is an above-average piece of Canonical writing. It is certainly one of my very favorite episodes on the Holmes saga, and definitely my favorite of the latter (Last Bow/Casebook) adventures.
The story opens amidst the steam of a Turkish bath, where Holmes first tells Watson of the problem of Baron Gruner. Soon we learn that it was in the warm waters of the Mediterranean that Gruner first cast his spell on poor Violet de Merville. But when Holmes meets Gruner face-to-face, the story "temperature" drops rapidly:
"He is an excellent antagonist," Holmes observes, "cool as ice, silky voiced and soothing as one of your fashionable consultants, and poisonous as a cobra."
Mark that! "Cool as ice." And his hypnotized fiancee Violet seems suitably matched; her mercury stands quite low in the tube as well. Holmes reports to Watson that she has "a voice like the wind from an iceberg." Indeed, once Violet encounters Kitty Winter, Holmes remarks that "if ever you saw flame and ice face to face, it was those two women."
And now that I've mentioned Kitty Winter, of course, we must speak of her much more. Here is my favorite character in this story, the wonderful enigma of fire (cf. Holmes' description just mentioned) and the ice of her polar surname. When she is introduced our author describes her as "a slim, flame-like young woman." How is she flame-like? The author goes on to tell of her "fierce energy" and the "intensity of hatred in her white, set face and her blazing eyes such as woman seldom and man never can attain."
And surely it is no coincidence that Kitty's instrument of revenge is vitriol (sulfuric acid!) – resulting in an "inflamed" eye and melting skin.
But of course the ultimate reference of this kind is in Miss Winter's mocking description of the deplorable conditions in which she lives. In her very first words in the story, she refers to her neighborhood through a metaphor -- one which cannot be surpassed when describing unpleasant extremes of temperature.