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Show 278 up. This morning I taught a class before I came down here."4 As an old, old woman, she barely ceased her teaching. Obstacles still found her their visitor. In the winter of 1933-34, though she had passed her eight-fifth birthday, she conducted a class in obstetrics from a sick bed. where she had to lie for three months after a heart attack.6 Imagine! But it should not be surprising in one with so much grit and tenacity. This is reminiscent of a time when, at an earlier period in her life, she had her apartment and office on the second floor of a building in downtown Salt Lake City and could not, "for a number of years" go up and down stairs. Yet she continued to function, her sons carrying her jj£stairs, and she sliding down on an ironing board. In 1932, the 85-year-old Ellis, in giving a talk about her life told her listeners, regarding abortion, "that little spark of life is just as sacred in the very beginning...as it is after it comes into the world." In this one talk (which must stand as the pattern for her public speaking, in the absence of other examples) Ellis displayed a greater flair for the dramatic than is discernible in her writings. She had, by this time, an adoring public, and was perhaps yielding to the temptation to play to them, using this occasion to tell of the many unwed mothers who had come to her for help, mourning that having the baby would surely bring "disgrace" to their lives. "You should have thought of this before," she says she told them, giving them a charge to keep, care for, and love their |