Question

The drawing-room of the Grange was a vast, low-ceiled apartment, whose dark oak paneling had absorbed the light of three generations of indifferent hearths. Mrs. Dering sat by the narrow casement, where the gray afternoon filtered through panes leaded in rigid diamonds. Outside, the untended box-borders of the parterre had grown into dense, blackish walls, choking the gravel paths and crowding the pale, stunted asters that struggled in the shade of the overgrown yews. Inside, the air was heavy with the smell of dry rose-leaves and beeswax—a static fragrance that seemed to check the breath. Upon the mantelpiece stood a massive Ormolu clock, its gilded Cupid frozen in a perpetual gesture of arrest above the silent dial, the mainspring having snapped during the late Mr. Dering’s final illness. Mrs. Dering’s needle did not move; her eyes were fixed on the clock's arrested gilt hands, which seemed to bind her to the room’s cold, immovable history.

In the passage, the description of the drawing-room's interior—specifically the 'rigid diamonds' of the window panes and the 'frozen' Cupid of the broken clock—primarily functions to do which of the following?