Question

Read the following passage from Sherwood Anderson’s story "Hands" carefully:

"Upon the half-decayed veranda of a small, yellow house before which lay a dusty road, Wing Biddlebaum walked rapidly up and down. Half a dozen schoolboys were coming down the road, shouting and laughing. They were many miles from home and had been out into the woods for wildflowers. One of the boys threw a lump of earth at the old man, who did not protest but ran to the end of the veranda and there stood waiting, trembling with excitement, while the boys passed out of sight down the road.

For Wing Biddlebaum, Ohio was not a fate but a playground. He was a fat little old man, and his hands, which were continually fluttering about like the wings of an imprisoned bird, had earned him his name. Wing Biddlebaum had lived for twenty years in this house, in this town, where he was regarded with a mixture of pity and suspicion. He was a man who lived in a state of perpetual fear, and yet his hands, those restless, fluttering things, seemed to have a life of their own, independent of his will.

He wanted to talk to George Willard, the young reporter who was his only friend in Winesburg, but he was afraid. When he talked to George, he kept his hands hidden. He put them in his pockets or sat on them. But when he became excited, the hands would escape. They would flutter out and begin to carve the air, to pat George on the shoulder, or to make strange, sweeping gestures that seemed to speak a language of their own. It was as though the hands were trying to tell a story that Wing’s tongue could never utter—a story of a past that had been buried so deep that even Wing himself could no longer fully remember it, except through the frantic, silent language of his fingers.

In the town of Winesburg, Wing was a silent figure, a ghost flitting along the edges of other people’s lives. He was like a tree that had been struck by lightning, still standing but hollowed out, its green leaves replaced by dry, whispering branches. The townspeople, busy with their own crops and their own small ambitions, had no time for his silences or his gestures. To them, he was merely 'Wing,' a harmless eccentric whose presence was tolerated but never welcomed. George Willard, however, saw something else. In Wing’s presence, George felt the shadow of a tragedy that he could not name, a weight that hung in the quiet air of the veranda like the threat of rain on a hot summer afternoon. He stayed and listened, not to Wing's words, which were sparse and hesitant, but to the desperate, unspoken pleading of those hands."

Which of the following best describes how the author structures the progression of details to develop the line of reasoning about Wing Biddlebaum’s isolation?