Question

Dr. Julian Vance adjusted his collar against the damp river air, his face set in the severe, unflinching cast that his colleagues at the sanitary commission had come to fear. For months, he had argued with a cold, mathematical certainty for the quarantine of the lower ward, dismissing the local merchants’ appeals as the “sentimental whimperings of the unscientific.” To Julian, human affairs were problems of plumbing and volume; he spoke of the epidemic in terms of flow rates and containment grids.

Yet, as he walked past the makeshift clinics of the docklands, he stopped before the window of an apothecary. The proprietor, an old woman named Mrs. Gantry who had openly defied his sanitary regulations, sat asleep by a cold grate, her knuckles swollen from labor. Without a word, Julian reached into his coat, drew out his own flask of tea—brewed with the expensive willow-bark infusion he had publicly condemned as a useless folk remedy—and slipped it onto her counter. He paused, his fingers lingering on the polished tin of the flask, before drawing back and adjusting his gloves. As he stepped back into the street, his stride was as rigid as ever, and when a junior clerk approached him with a report on the rising mortality rates, Julian snapped, “Tell them we will not waste coal heating the isolation tents. The ledger allows only for lime and lime-powder.”

In the passage, Julian’s silent delivery of the willow-bark infusion to Mrs. Gantry, contrasted with his subsequent refusal to heat the isolation tents, serves primarily to do which of the following?