1 He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase.
2 This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely aware of his fears.
3 An expression of the profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man's refined face.
4 He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him.
5 In that quarter of the town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have created surprise.
6 His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room.
7 And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed.
8 From time to time, he would mutter something, from the habit of talking to himself, to which he had just confessed.
9 He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags.
10 He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair.
11 This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria.
12 But there was such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young man's heart, that, in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least of all in the street.
13 The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open.
14 The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture.
15 But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie--no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.
16 The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer--all worked painfully upon the young man's already overwrought nerves.
17 Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number of establishments of bad character, the preponderance of the trading and working class population crowded in these streets and alleys in the heart of Petersburg, types so various were to be seen in the streets that no figure, however queer, would have caused surprise.
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