He had become so completely absorbed in himself and isolated from everyone else that he dreaded meeting not only his landlady, but anyone at all.
The heat in the street was terrible: the airlessness, the bustle, the plaster, the scaffolding, the bricks and the dust all around him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to everyone who is unable to get out of town during the summer—all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves.
“It’s in the houses of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness,” Raskolnikov thought again, as he stole a curious glance at the cotton curtain over the door leading into another tiny room, in which stood the old woman’s bed and chest of drawers and into which he had never looked before.”