Question

The town of Oakhaven was built on a limestone shelf that refused to hold water, a dry upland where the citizens had spent three generations measuring their virtue by the size of their cisterns. In Oakhaven, thrift was not merely a habit; it was the sole metric of moral rectitude, and a leaky roof was viewed with the same quiet horror as a lapse in marital fidelity. Thomas, who had spent his youth in the river valley where the water ran red with silt and flowed without asking, found the cleanliness of Oakhaven sterile, even predatory. He had watched his father-in-law, a deacon of the lime-kiln church, lock his well-crank every evening at dusk, as if the very air might steal the moisture from the bucket. To Thomas, the sound of the iron padlock snapping shut was the sound of a small, cold mind sealing itself against the world. Yet, as the third month of the Great Drought wore on, and the dust from the limestone quarries began to settle in the creases of his own palms, Thomas found himself waking at midnight to listen to the slow, agonizing drip from his own kitchen tap. He did not call a plumber. Instead, he lay in the dark, calculating the value of each drop against the cost of his neighbor’s esteem, realizing with a sudden, sick certainty that the dry earth had finally hollowed out his own generosity, leaving only the hard, calcareous shell of Oakhaven's survivalism.

Which of the following best describes how the physical and cultural setting of Oakhaven influences Thomas's internal values over the course of the passage?