I mean it, it’s another gap in your education. Until you can learn to understand her, you’ll get nowhere as a detective. She’s everybody’s conscience, Bob—the universal maiden aunt, cousin or sister. Humanity’s backbone. Throughout history, she’s gone to the stake for you again and again; not with any sense of heroism, but as a matter of principle and because it would never occur to her to do anything else.

Knowing themselves to be faultless, they make it their mission to detect the myriad faults in others, against which they wage incessant tongue.