[In her Collected Stories] Eudora Welty's real self percolates into a generous fiction that wastes very little time on disapproval. She wanders, marveling, over the landscape of soul and senses, never allowing the smallest fluctuation in either to escape her, but she is not a moralist. She has no vocation for rectitude, and one can search in vain among dozens of her springy, piquant, often irascible characters for those implications of psychological delinquency that give such dramatic tension to the stories of Henry James. Yet she is no less a psychologist; she simply is more interested in our efforts and longings than in our guilts and weaknesses. (p. 3)

Whenever she discerns a fault in someone, she leaves room for an advantage or a felicity. In "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies," three biddies of an age to wear widow's black and get hot easily are about to plump...