A new perspective on a Jean Stafford story

Strangely, I don't think I'd ever read a Jean Stafford story until i read Children are Bored on Sunday, a 1946 story in the current throwback issue of the New Yorker; Stafford has long been a familiar name to me, but only, I hate to admit, as the abused wife of the great poet Robert Lowell. Reading this 1946 story - which is very much of its time and era yet stands up well after 70+ years - makes me want to go back and read more of her work. This piece is from the POV of a young woman living in New York, welcomed to or at least tolerated by the intellectual set in Manhattan in that era, but feeling herself to be a rube (her term) and unsophisticated, not nearly as quick nor as clever as those w/ whom she socializes. At the time of this narrative, she has withdrawn from her social set, at least temporarily, and is wracked by doubt and loneliness - and dangerous drawn to serious drinking. The story opens w/ her in the Met Museum on a Sunday as she spots a young man in the same social set, with whom she has "flirted" at a party some months back. She takes various evasive steps so as not to have to speak w/ him and is somewhat resentful that he has ruined her solitary visit to the Met - she has lost her focus on the artworks and keeps thinking about her sorrowful social life and her self-doubt. As she leaves the museum, the young man hales her, and she recollects some gossip she'd picked up about his failed marriage and his depression - and in fact he looks ill and sorrowful. The two head off for a nearby bar on a less posh street, where they, presumably, will drown their sorrows. So overall, the piece captures a moment in time in the NY literary-cultural scene, long gone, as well as the anxieties familiar to anyone who's moved to NY or to any big city hoping to make it but feeling like an outsider, and ends on a wistful yet scary note: People drank heavily in those days of course, more than today I think, and we know how alcoholism undid so many marriages and minds in that social set, most likely Stafford (and Lowell), too. If the story may have had a patina of glamour in its day, our perspective now gives it an aura of darkness and foreboding.