Question

Read the following passage carefully before choosing your answer:

Mrs. Helena Sterling adjusted the lace at her cuffs, her eyes tracking the sweep of Clara’s silk gown as her daughter crossed the drawing-room to meet the rector. It was not the gown’s cost that prickled Helena—though the bills from the milliner were still unresolved on her mahogany desk—but rather the effortless insolence with which Clara wore it. Clara moved as if the room, the guests, and indeed the very parish itself had been laid out solely for her amusement. Helena remembered her own girlhood, spent in the damp, quiet vicarage under the perpetual shadow of her father’s disapproval, where every step was measured and every word weighed like gold. She had learned to occupy as little space as possible, wrapping her desires in a gray cloak of duty. Now, watching Clara laugh—a sound too bright and unmanaged for the room's low ceilings—Helena felt a cold swell of resentment that she immediately christened as motherly concern. She whispered a prayer for Clara��s humility, but her gaze remained fixed on the rector’s approving nod, calculating the exact social capital Clara’s careless charm might yield before the season’s end.

In the passage, Helena’s internal monologue and reactions to Clara primarily serve to reveal a tension between her