Mrs. Amberton surveyed the parlor with a small, tight click of her tongue, adjusting the silver candelabra by a fraction of an inch. It was imperative, she reminded herself, that the room present an air of absolute indifference to the afternoon’s proceedings. The velvet drapes, heavy with the dust of seasons she preferred to forget, were drawn just enough to exclude the harsh, accusatory glare of the streetlamp, yet open enough to permit a respectable stream of gray light. After all, one did not want Arthur to believe they had prepared for him. She had instructed the maid to leave the tea tray unpolished—a master stroke of calculated neglect. When Arthur arrived, he would see only the serene, unruffled surface of a home that had continued its dignified orbit entirely independent of his long absence. He would see that his departure had left no scar, no void. As she smoothed the crease of her lavender silk skirt, her hand trembled slightly, a localized rebellion that she quickly suppressed by clasping her fingers tightly in her lap. It was merely the chill of the drawing room; the fireplace was notoriously drafty, and it was certainly not due to any foolish anticipation of the boy’s footfall on the gravel path outside.
In the passage, the third-person limited narrative point of view primarily functions to do which of the following?
- Aestablish an objective, impartial narrative distance that allows the reader to judge Mrs. Amberton’s hostility toward Arthur without bias
- Billustrate how the physical draftiness of the drawing room acts as the primary cause of Mrs. Amberton’s visible distress
- Cconvey the author's overt moral condemnation of Mrs. Amberton's obsession with social decorum and domestic appearance
- reveal the tension between Mrs. Amberton’s conscious attempts to project emotional detachment and her subconscious anxiety regarding Arthur’s returnAnswer
- Eoutline the chronological sequence of domestic tasks Mrs. Amberton performs to ready the parlor for her guest