Crime and Punishment

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
they are cross-examining, to disarm his caution and then all at once to
give him an unexpected knock-down blow with some fatal question. Isn’t
that so? It’s a sacred tradition, mentioned, I fancy, in all the manuals
of the art?”

“Yes, yes.... Why, do you imagine that was why I spoke about government
quarters... eh?”

And as he said this Porfiry Petrovitch screwed up his eyes and winked;
a good-humoured, crafty look passed over his face. The wrinkles on his
forehead were smoothed out, his eyes contracted, his features broadened
and he suddenly went off into a nervous prolonged laugh, shaking all
over and looking Raskolnikov straight in the face. The latter forced
himself to laugh, too, but when Porfiry, seeing that he was laughing,
broke into such a guffaw that he turned almost crimson, Raskolnikov’s
repulsion overcame all precaution; he left off laughing, scowled and
stared with hatred at Porfiry, keeping his eyes fixed on him while his