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Show 148 the time. In the later version, at the point where Milford expressed reservations about letting her go, she leaped right out of bed and ran to the train, her little barefooted boys following, apparently the only ones to see her off. The earlier version, and without doubt the more reliable one, is much more fair to Milford. But for this oblique slight, Ellis seemed always to take great care not to cast her husband in a bad light, and never seems to have said anything uncharitable about him. Perhaps, like B. H. Roberts' wife, Celia, she destroyed some intimate letters and records before her death. The nightmarish aspects of her second departure for medical college were heightened by a dream she had, three times in one night after arriving there, of bearing a one-armed girl baby. The mood clung to her in such a pronounced way that Mrs. Wilson and one of Ellis' classmates questioned her closely and elicited from her the admission that she was pregnant. Apparently meaning to be kind, they let her know that there was, at the college, opportunity to abort the fetus so that she would not have to jeopardize her chances of graduating through the untimely arrival of a baby. "I just stood up in all my offended dignity and said...I came 13 here to learn how to save life, not to take it." Ellis's contemporary diary continues with her train trip east on the morning of September 27, 1876. She has felt pangs before at separations from the children or from Milford; but this time there is an almost physical agony at leaving her "dear, dear husband" and her "darling children." |