Question

Gregory, the empire’s master cartographer, spent his days under the harsh light of the state house, mapping the newly conquered western territories with mathematical certainty. In his official reports, he frequently asserted that the progress of civilization relied on the absolute eradication of geographical ambiguity; to leave a valley unmeasured or a river unplotted was, in Gregory's view, a failure of intellect. His lines were clean, his coordinates verified by three separate astronomical readings, and his maps left no room for speculation or myth.

Yet, after the clerks departed and the oil lamps flickered low, Gregory would pull a worn, unauthorized ledger from a floorboard under his desk. In it, he did not sketch the solid roads of the empire, but rather detailed the contours of phantom islands, uncharted reefs, and shifting shorelines that existed only in his memory or imagination. When his young apprentice once discovered him working on these illicit sheets, Gregory hastily dismissed them as "speculative error-trapping diagrams to test the limits of mathematical projection." However, long after the apprentice left, Gregory sat in the dim room, his ink-stained fingers tracing the nonexistent coastlines with a slow, deliberate tenderness that he never displayed toward the official cartography of the realm.

Which of the following best describes the literary function of the inconsistency in Gregory's behavior?