103. Read the following passage, then answer the question below.

In the early hours of September 2, 1666, a fire broke out in a bakery on Pudding Lane in London. Such fires were common in a city of wooden houses, narrow lanes, and roofs coated with pitch, but this one met a strong east wind and a dry summer. Within hours, flames leapt across the lanes, and the city's firefighting methods, which relied on leather buckets and hand-held squirts, proved hopeless. The authorities hesitated. The Lord Mayor, awakened in the night, is said to have dismissed the blaze with the remark that a woman might put it out. By the time the order came to pull down houses to create firebreaks, the fire had grown beyond control. It burned for four days, destroying about thirteen thousand houses and eighty-seven parish churches, along with the old St Paul's Cathedral. Surprisingly, only a handful of deaths were officially recorded, although historians suspect that the poor, whose deaths went unrecorded, were undercounted.

Many Londoners expected a bold new city. Christopher Wren and others submitted plans with wide avenues and grand piazzas. Yet none was adopted, largely because landowners insisted on rebuilding on their old plots and the Crown lacked the funds to buy them out. The Rebuilding Act of 1667 instead set practical rules: houses had to be of brick or stone, and the streets were widened somewhat, but the medieval street pattern largely survived.

The disaster nonetheless left a lasting mark. Wren was put in charge of rebuilding fifty-one churches, and his new St Paul's, completed in 1710, became the city's emblem. The experience also created a market: the first fire insurance company in London was established in the 1680s, and insurers formed their own brigades whose badges, called fire marks, were nailed to the buildings they protected. Thus the fire, though devastating, reshaped the city's architecture and its attitude toward risk.

The word 'hesitated' in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to