Soru

Read the following passage carefully before answering the question.

Bartholomew Goring did not look up from his ledger when Martha entered the library. The room was heavy with the scent of damp leather and cold ash, a testament to his refusal to light the grate before November. He dipped his steel-pen into the inkwell with a sharp, rhythmic click that Martha knew was intended to measure her intrusion.

'You have seen the surveyor, then?' he asked, his voice dry as parchment.

'I have,' Martha said, standing near the window where the gray afternoon light offered cold comfort. 'He agrees that the lower meadow is unfit for tillage. It must remain lease-ground, as my father always intended.'

Bartholomew let the pen hover, a single drop of ink swelling at its nib before falling to stain the margin of his neat columns. 'Your father was a romantic, Martha, and romanticism is an expensive luxury in these times. The valley does not care for intentions; it cares for yields. If we do not drain the ditch and plant by Michaelmas, the estate will not survive the winter interest.'

Martha watched the ink sink into the paper, spreading in a dark, irregular bruise. She realized then that her uncle’s insistence on the plow was not born of greed, as she had long suspected, but of a quiet, desperate terror of ruin. Yet his cold calculation felt to her like a second bereavement, a systematic dismantling of the only landscape her memory held secure.

Martha’s realization in the final paragraph ('She realized... terror of ruin') primarily serves to reveal that her uncle’s cold calculation is motivated by which of the following?