Read the statement below. Prince Prospero shows no sympathy for the people who are dying of sickness.
Which sentence from the passage best supports this statement?
from The Masque of the Red Death
by Edgar Allan Poe
The "Red Death" had long devaltated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its
seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with
dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the
aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half
an hour.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his
presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep
seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric
yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and
massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or
of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The
external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of
pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was
wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death".