Question

Read the following passage carefully:

Arthur Pendelton examined the charred remains of the Upton homestead with the dispassionate eye of a man who had measured the ashes of a hundred lives. To Arthur, a fire was not a tragedy; it was a ledger entry of depreciated drywall, water-damaged pine, and the scrap value of iron piping. He noted the soot-stained bricks with a swift, rhythmic scratching of his mechanical pencil, ignoring the weeping of Mrs. Upton as she sifted through the ruins of her childhood photographs. His colleagues at the firm admired him for this: he was the "Calculus of the Company," impervious to the theatricality of grief.

Yet, as he reached the perimeter of the property, near the edge of the blackened orchard, he spotted a small, half-melted tin soldier lying in the mud. He looked back toward the road to ensure his driver was not watching. Then, with a swiftness that defied his usual arthritic deliberation, Arthur knelt, wiped the ash from the lead figure's face with his silk monogrammed handkerchief—a costly accessory he normally guarded with obsessive care—and slipped it into his breast pocket. In his notes, under the section for unsalvageable debris, he recorded the soldier's value as "null," but as he patted his coat, his fingers lingered over the warm metal, and his mouth tightened in a line that looked remarkably like a suppressed sob.

Which of the following best describes the literary function of the contrast between Arthur's professional conduct and his private reaction to the tin soldier?