Adelaide Prioleau sat back on her heels. She looked at the child for a long time. Then she looked at Viola Gadsden across her, and she said the thing that Toomer thought, afterward, she had come there on Monday afternoon to say, whether or not she had known it.
"Mrs. Gadsden," she said. "I have epilepsy. I've had it since I was eleven years old. I have never said that out loud in a room with more than one person in it. I am saying it now so that your daughter can hear it when she's awake enough to hear anything." She leaned down, close, to the child's face. "Tilly. Can you hear me, darling? It's the lady who wanted your dog. I have the same thing you have. I've had it all my life. I'm sixty-eight. I got married and I lived in a house with a garden and I read a great many books, and I'm still here. Do you understand me? You're going to be all right. And you have to keep him. He's yours. He's not mine. He was only borrowing me."
Tilly looked up at her, foggy. "You got it too?"
"I do."
"Does it make you wet your pants?"
"Sometimes," said Adelaide Prioleau. "It's a dreadful nuisance. I keep a spare pair of stockings in my pocketbook."
And the child, on the floor, with her mother's hand in her hair and the dog along her back, smiled.
Adelaide got up, slowly, with her husband's hand under her arm. She did not look at Toomer. She looked at him. And Pinckney Prioleau looked back at her for a long moment, and then he said, quietly, "Yes. Of course," and turned to the counter, and said, "Mrs. Toomer, I believe you have a contract in a drawer somewhere with my name on it."