Oops, I’m noticing a theme. Spencer is American and southern, and the introduction to my edition of this collection is by Eudora Welty. The Adult Holiday is short, potent, and not a million miles away from the Maxwell, with its wise insights about the complicated business of love, marriage, regret, and passing time.

Available to read via this link, anthologised in The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (US edition Doubleday, 1981, reissued by Penguin in the UK in 1983).