Soru

Read the following passage carefully:

The wind off the salt flats carried the scent of decaying brine and cold iron, a combination Miriam had come to associate with her uncle’s persistent visits. Gregory stood at the edge of the decaying dyke, his cane jabbed deep into the black silt as if he could pin the shifting geography in place by force of will alone.

"It is five hundred acres of waterlogged uselessness, Miriam," he said, not looking at her, but rather at the grey tide rising to swallow the salt-grass. "Your grandfather spent a fortune trying to wall out the sea, and for what? A few patches of coarse fodder and a cellar that floods with every spring tide. The Reclamation Syndicate offers a clean sum—enough to secure your position in the city, to live as a woman of your station ought, rather than playing the hermit among the curlews."

Miriam smoothed the damp map across the flat top of the stone boundary marker. The paper was soft with moisture, the ink of the old surveys fading into blue smudges. "My grandfather did not build the dykes to reclaim the land, Uncle," she said quietly. "He built them to watch the sea break them down. If you read his journals, you would see he kept a daily record of the breaches. He was not farming; he was measuring the rate of our retreat."

Gregory turned, his brow furrowed with the genuine irritation of a man who believed that all problems, including grief and mud, could be resolved by double-entry bookkeeping. "A costly eccentricity, then. One you cannot afford to inherit. You speak of retreat as if it were a philosophy, Miriam, but in the town they call it ruin. A young woman alone, holding onto a dissolving estate out of some misplaced loyalty to a dead man’s madness—it is unseemly. The syndicate will drain the channel, stabilize the silt, and lay down a rail-line. It is progress. It is order."

"It is a monument of sand," Miriam replied, watching a heron lift from the reeds. She did not add that the silence of the marsh was the only thing that kept the noise of her uncle's world at bay. To sell was to admit that the land’s value was determined solely by what could be taken from it, a perspective that made her feel as empty as the reclaimed fields would be.

In the passage, which of the following best describes the primary motivation behind Miriam’s reluctance to sell the marshland?