Soru

Read the following passage carefully before answering the question.

It was not that Clarissa disliked the schoolhouse, but rather that she feared the shadow it cast over the lane. To her mother, the construction was a monument to the family’s benevolence, a neat pile of red brick that would elevate the parish and, by extension, their own standing in the county. Mrs. Penrose spoke of the children’s alphabets with a proprietary warmth, as if literacy itself were a commodity she had personally imported for their benefit. Clarissa, however, could only look at the building and see the old chestnut tree that had been felled to make room for it. For years, that tree had been her solitary refuge, a green canopy where the demands of the drawing-room could not reach her. Now, the raw earth around the foundation seemed like an open wound, and the neat rows of desks inside felt less like tools of enlightenment and more like small, varnished cells designed to press the wildness out of the village children just as her own mother had pressed it out of her. When Mrs. Penrose turned to her, her face glowing with charitable satisfaction, and asked if the masonry was not indeed a triumph, Clarissa felt the familiar tightening in her throat. To speak her mind would be to invite a lecture on ingratitude; to agree would be to betray the memory of the tree and the quiet rebellion it had sheltered. She compromised, offering a murmured comment on the neatness of the mortar, a response that her mother accepted as her due, entirely blind to the grief that lay beneath it.

Which of the following best describes Clarissa’s primary motive in her final response to her mother?