His fat round little figure looked very strange, like a ball rolling
from one side to the other and rebounding back.

"We've plenty of time. Do you smoke? have you your own? Here, a
cigarette!" he went on, offering his visitor a cigarette. "You know I am
receiving you here, but my own quarters are through there, you know, my
government quarters. But I am living outside for the time, I had to
have some repairs done here. It's almost finished now.... Government
quarters, you know, are a capital thing. Eh, what do you think?"

"Yes, a capital thing," answered Raskolnikov, looking at him almost
ironically.

"A capital thing, a capital thing," repeated Porfiry Petrovitch, as
though he had just thought of something quite different. "Yes, a capital
thing," he almost shouted at last, suddenly staring at Raskolnikov and
stopping short two steps from him.

This stupid repetition was too incongruous in its ineptitude with the
serious, brooding and enigmatic glance he turned upon his visitor.

But this stirred Raskolnikov's spleen more than ever and he could not
resist an ironical and rather incautious challenge.

"Tell me, please," he asked suddenly, looking almost insolently at him
and taking a kind of pleasure in his own insolence. "I believe it's a
sort of legal rule, a sort of legal tradition--for all investigating
lawyers--to begin their attack from afar, with a trivial, or at least
an irrelevant subject, so as to encourage, or rather, to divert the man