Miss Welty’s central and universal concern is the mystery of the inner life. “Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery,” she has said; “it is not words that make it so in life, but words have to make it so in a story. Brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.” “Mystery” here suggests the enigma of man’s being, and his relation to the universe; it suggests also what is concealed, secret, inviolable in human beings, putting up the barriers, making our meaning and identity puzzling to ourselves. This particular theme is explored beautifully and poignantly in the story “A Still Moment,” in which evangelist, murderer, and naturalist share a common and yet disparate revelation of nature, looking at a snowy heron. Lorenzo’s shattering illumination, that “God had . . . given Love first and then Separateness, as though it did not matter to Him which came first,” sums up the yearning love of human beings, their desire for response and understanding, and the fundamental solitude experienced by many of the characters in these stories. They are poised alone; no other creature can fathom their hidden selves. Tom Harris of “The Hitch-Hikers” is one of these puzzled and lonely men, a generous sort, but rootless. His life is full of giving yet empty of permanent commitment; his love is freely floating yet weary, desolate. Moral loneliness, the burden of an inexpiable guilt that no one will recognize, afflicts Steve in “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden.” Mr. Marblehall’s is the loneliness of being ignored, and Livvie’s the loneliness of physical and emotional isolation from the world in which she naturally belongs. Livvie returns to life (the original title of that story was “Livvie Is Back”), and Old Phoenix is never for a moment really lost, even though her senses are dimmed with age and memory betrays her briefly when she reaches the end of her worn path. But not everyone is so harmonious as Phoenix, so lucky as Livvie.