Answer: It therefore now occurred to me that the surest way of learning the exact attitude of this beast toward me would be to attempt to leave the room.
In this excerpt, we can see that the narrator is reckless. He is describing a beast who is clearly interested in him. However, it is not clear whether the beast is trying to protect him, attack him, guard him, or fulfill another possible purpose. However, the narrator is willing to leave the room and anger him in order to find out what the beast's intention is. This is extremely reckless behaviour as it puts him at risk.
The answer is the first one, A. The narrator has no knowledge of how the beast behaves, yet she's willing to go out of her way to agitate it in order learn more about the thing.
The “melting pot” is a metaphor that used to represent the fusion of foreign cultures from immigrants and American culture, schools are one of the vital “tools” that many advocates promoted to “melt” the immigrants' cultures and Americanize the foreign population.
