Read the following passage from a short story:
"For years, Mrs. Gable maintained the formal gardens of the estate with the devotion of a vestal virgin guarding a sacred flame. When the new motorway was constructed, slicing through the ancient oak grove at the property’s edge, she did not protest. Instead, she retreated to the glass greenhouse, cultivating rare, fragile orchids. To her nephew, this retreat was not a surrender but the relocation of her entire empire to a single, fortified citadel. In that humid sanctuary, she ruled over her silent, green subjects, indifferent to the rumble of trucks outside, treating the glass panes as an impenetrable shield against the encroaching century."
In the passage, the metaphorical description of the greenhouse as a "fortified citadel" primarily serves to do which of the following?
- Ahighlight the physical durability of the greenhouse’s architecture in contrast to the fragile orchids
- emphasize the character’s deliberate effort to protect her personal values from the pressures of modern lifeCevap
- Cillustrate the author’s explicit condemnation of industrialization and technological progress
- Ddocument the sequence of events that led to the destruction of the estate's formal gardens
- Esuggest that the character’s isolation is a form of penance for her failure to protest the motorway