"You've settled here for good?" the prince asked, looking around the study.
"Yes, I'm at home here.
Where else should I be?"
"We haven't seen each other for a long time.
I've heard such things about you, it's as if it were not you."
"People say all kinds of things," Rogozhin observed drily.
"You've scattered your whole company, though; you sit here in the parental house, doing no mischief.
So, that's good.
Is it your house or all the family's?"
"The house is my mother's.
She lives there down the corridor."
"And where does your brother live?"
"Brother Semyon Semyonych is in the wing."
"Does he have a family?"
"He's a widower.
Why do you ask?"
The prince looked at him and did not answer; he suddenly became pensive and seemed not to hear the question.
Rogozhin did not insist and waited.
Silence fell.
"I recognized your house just now from a hundred paces away, as I was approaching," said the prince.
"Why so?"
"I have no idea.
Your house has the physiognomy of your whole family and of your whole Rogozhin life, but ask me why I think that—and I can't explain it.
Nonsense, of course.
I'm even afraid of how much it disturbs me.
It never occurred to me before that this would be the sort of house you lived in, but when I saw it, I thought at once: 'Yes, that's exactly the kind of house he had to have!' " "See!" Rogozhin smiled vaguely, not quite understanding the prince's unclear thought.
"This house was built by my grandfather," he observed.
"Castrates used to live here, the Khludiakovs, they rent from us even now."
"So gloomy.
You sit in such gloom," said the prince, looking around the study.
It was a big room, high, darkish, cluttered with all sorts of furniture—mostly big desks, bureaus, bookcases in which ledgers and papers were kept.
A wide red morocco couch apparently served Rogozhin as a bed.
On the table at which Rogozhin had seated him, the prince noticed two or three books; one of them, Solovyov's History,15 was open and had a bookmark in it.
On the walls, in dull gilt frames, hung several oil paintings, dark, sooty, on which it was hard to make anything out.
One full-length portrait drew the prince's attention: it depicted a man of about fifty, in a frock coat of German cut but with long skirts, with two medals on his neck, a very sparse and short, grayish beard, a wrinkled and yellow face, and a suspicious, secretive, and somewhat doleful gaze.
"That wouldn't be your father?" asked the prince.
"The man himself," Rogozhin replied with an unpleasant smile, as if readying himself for some immediate, unceremonious joke about his deceased parent.
"He wasn't an Old Believer, was he?"16
"No, he went to church, but it's true he used to say the old belief was more correct.
He also had great respect for the castrates.
This was his study.
Why did you ask about the old belief?"
"Will you celebrate the wedding here?"
"Y-yes, here," replied Rogozhin, almost starting at the sudden question.
"Soon?"
"You know yourself it doesn't depend on me!"
"Parfyon, I'm not your enemy and have no intention of hindering you in anything.
I repeat it to you now just as I told it to you once before, in a moment almost like this.
When your wedding was under way in Moscow, I didn't hinder you, you know that.
The first time it was she who came rushing to me, almost from the foot of the altar, begging me to 'save' her from you.