Question

Read the following passage carefully:

The basement offices of the Great Eastern Railway Company were carved from the city's wet clay foundations, a subterranean realm of damp brick where the air smelled permanently of soot and wet wool. Above, the trains rattled along the iron tracks, sending a rhythmic, low vibration down through the wooden desks and into the bones of the clerks. Evelyn sat under the yellow glare of a single gas jet, transcribing columns of coal shipments into vast, calfskin-bound ledgers. In this room, time was not measured by the rising or setting of the sun—both of which were entirely invisible—but by the precise, mechanical delivery of new waybills every two hours. Mr. Gable, the supervisor, sat on a raised platform, his pocket watch resting open on his desk like a brass eye. To the railway system, a clerk’s value lay entirely in the alignment of their figures and the absence of ink blots. Evelyn, who had once spent her afternoons sketching wild gorse on the Suffolk cliffs, found that the vault's windowless walls slowly eroded her memory of the open sky. She no longer looked for beauty; instead, she found a strange, numbing comfort in the absolute order of the columns, beginning to prize the cold precision of a completed ledger above all else.

In the passage, the details of the subterranean railway office setting best support which of the following assertions about Evelyn’s changing values?