f to Porfiry. I will squeeze it out of him, as
one of the family: he must let me know the ins and outs of it all! And
as for Zametov..."

"At last he sees through him!" thought Raskolnikov.

"Stay!" cried Razumihin, seizing him by the shoulder again. "Stay! you
were wrong. I have thought it out. You are wrong! How was that a trap?
You say that the question about the workmen was a trap. But if you had
done _that_, could you have said you had seen them painting the flat...
and the workmen? On the contrary, you would have seen nothing, even if
you had seen it. Who would own it against himself?"

"If I had done _that thing_, I should certainly have said that I had
seen the workmen and the flat," Raskolnikov answered, with reluctance
and obvious disgust.

"But why speak against yourself?"

"Because only peasants, or the most inexperienced novices deny
everything flatly at examinations. If a man is ever so little developed
and experienced, he will certainly try to admit all the external facts
that can't be avoided, but will seek other explanations of them, will
introduce some special, unexpected turn, that will give them another
significance and put them in another light. Porfiry might well reckon
that I should be sure to answer so, and say I had seen them to give an
air of truth, and then make some explanation."

"But he would have told you at once that the workmen could not have been
there two days before, and that therefore you must have been there on
the day of the murder at eight o'clock. And so he would have caught you
over a detail."

"Yes, that is what he was reckoning on, that I should not have time to
reflect, and should be in a hurry to make the most likely answer, and
so would forget that the workmen could not have been there two days
before."

"But how could you forget it?"

"Nothing easier. It is in just such stupid things clever people are most
easily caught. The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he
will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler
the trap he must be caught in. Porfiry is not such a fool as you
think...."

"He is a knave then, if that is so!"

Raskolnikov could not help laughing. But at the very moment, he was
struck by the strangeness of his own frankness, and the eagerness
with which he had made this explanation, though he had kept up all the
preceding conversation with gloomy repulsion, obviously with a motive,
from necessity.

"I am ge