The strangeness of Willa Cather's The OId Beauty and what it may represent

First a note on yesterday's post: Gorky's The Hermit was published in the 1920s, not the 1940s - still a little surprising to see a story about a religious hermit published in the Soviet era, but maybe not a fatal act as it would have been under Stalin. Evidently there was an element in the Soviet culture in the 1920s that glorified and romanticized the independent spirit of the peasants - this kind of story would no doubt have been sharply critiqued in later years as decadent, the hermit as a degradation of the working classes. A second point - I'm reading these and a few other stories in an old edition of the Norton Anthology of Short Stories, edited by RV Casill, whom a knew a little bit when I covered the book scene in Rhode Island. His selections I must say seem a little perverse - as if he's intentionally avoiding most of the most-anthologized pieces. Would anyone say that The Tree of Knowledge represents the best of Henry James? Or that The Old Beauty represents the best of Willa Cather (though I admit I'm not familiar w/ all of her short fiction)? The Old Beauty is a pretty straightforward - for the most part - account of the life and demise of a woman considered a great society beauty in her youth who was divorced and undone by some obscure scandal - I can't remember if Cather specifies, but she does describe one scene in which the woman was caught by surprise while a man was almost molesting her - who went on to marry a Frenchman (who died in the World War) - we find her in this story when one those men who admired her in her youth (and who by chance broke up the scene of molestation) comes across her in a French ocean resort and they reminisce - she's lost her looks and leads a very diminished life, with a younger, less attractive but far more effervescent female companion. What give the story its edge is the strangeness of the attitude toward sexuality - as with much of Cather's fiction (and her life) there both an interest in and horror regarding cross-dressing. Though there does not appear to be a sexual relationship between the two older women, the younger of the two was famous as a music-hall performer who imitated men. And in the oddest moment in the story the two women and the elderly man are in a collision while being driven along a coastal range - the car that side swipes them is driven by two women, one known as Jim. the abhorrence with which former beauty treats this young evidently gay couple is uncalled for, surprising, and unexplained - except that literally crashing into this couple that represents the sexual forces and desires she has or may have suppressed unleashes something in her, opens a wound, and very shortly leads to her death. There's much of the usual snobbery and bigotry at various points in this story - typical of the class and of the time (not typical of Cather - of her characters' lives and eras), but the reaction to masculinity in a young woman is I think the oxygen on which this story runs.