Why one Edurora Welty short story works and another does not

Am now reading the second collection, The Wide Net, in Eudora Welty's "Collected Stories," these still from the early 40s - she was very productive early in her writing life - and in fact am halfway through the title story, which looks to be one of her best. Struck immediately in this second collection by a few aspects: first, the stories tend to be longer. Welty's first collection, though distinctly her voice and setting, was typical of many first collections in that the stories were relatively short and economical and she was trying several different styles and voices - perhaps, seeking her own best fit. Second collections do tend to have longer stories - writers more confident in their voice, edging toward the prospect of that inevitable novel, allowing their characters to have more space to develop and grow. Also, a bit of fear of burning up all that material - each story a potential novel, now gone. Second, I have to wonder about the first story in the collection, First Love: why that title, that promises a romance, when the story has nothing of the sort (except an unfulfilled man-crush perhaps?). She sets herself a really difficult challenge, a story from the POV of a deaf man and therefore devoid of all dialog, which is giving away her perhaps greatest strength. This story, set in 19th century, does not work at all. She gets under way with the title story, that returns to the qualities that make her great - great dialog, sly wit, odd characters portrayed with great sympathy. Like many fine stories, it focuses on a single action: man's attempt to find his wife, whim he believes may have drowned herself in the river (because we don't believe she did even for a second, the story is comic and odd rather than tragic and highly wrought, but we'll see how it ends).