Question

The estuary at low tide lay exposed like a ribbed, gray lung, breathing out the cold, sulfurous stench of rotting bladderwrack. Arthur stood at the window of the rental cottage, his fingers tracing the salt-bloomed pane that blurred the far shoreline into a smear of leaden water. Outside, the wooden pier—its pilings green-furred with weed and eaten away by shipworms—pointed accusingly toward the empty bay. The light was neither day nor night, but a stagnant, pearlescent dusk that seemed to suspend everything in a state of damp preservation. Every half-hour, the foghorn at the spit gave a low, mechanical groan, a sound that did not travel through the air so much as vibrate through the floorboards under Arthur's boots, settling in his chest like a physical weight. On the mantelpiece, a collection of dried sea-urchin shells, bleached to the color of bone, sat in a neat, dust-filmed row, each one a hollow monument to a life long since washed away. He had come here for the quiet, but the silence of the mudflats was thick, active, and crowded with the ghosts of things the tide had refused to carry back to the sea.

Based on the passage, which of the following best describes how the setting details function to reveal Arthur's psychological state?