"I hate that phrase 'getting into society.' I don't think one ought to attribute to one's self that sort of ambition. One ought to assume that one is in society--that one is society--and to hold that if one has good manners, one has from the social point of view achieved the great thing. The rest regards others." While she was a woman of the world, she was not a worldly woman. She might easily have been presented at court during her many seasons in London, but she never cared to be. She not infrequently met the Princess Louise and other members of the Royal Family, and her own comings and goings were chronicled in the London press. She was the guest and the intimate friend of titled persons in England and of those first in American society; but all this never altered her simple and utterly unaffected cordiality toward those who were of no social prominence whatever. "The reason for her popularity," wrote Miss Josephine Jenkins very justly, "is summed up in the sympathy of her nature, which expands with loving and often helpful solicitude to those seeking encouragement, precisely as it expands toward those having attained some noble distinction. Not every human being is endowed with this genius for appreciation." Mrs. Moulton wrote to Coulson Kernahan on one occasion: "I do wonder who spoke of me as 'a woman, above all things, of society.' Nothing could be more remote from truth. I simply will not go to balls; I don't care for large receptions, though I do go to them sometimes; I enjoy dinners, if I am by the right person. But I refuse ten invitations to every one I accept, and the thing I most and really care for in all the world is the love of congenial friends and quiet, intimate tête-à-tête with them. The superficial, external side of life is nothing to me. I long for honest and true love as a child set down in a desert might long for the mother's sheltering arms." On New Year's day, 1895, she wrote, with that curious periodicity which characterized the opening of so many years for her, a sonnet entitled "Oh, Traveller by Unaccustomed Ways," fine and strong, and with haunting lines such as: Searcher among new worlds for pleasures new.--.... Some wild, sweet fragrance of remembered days. The sestet is as follows: I send my message to thee by the stars-- Since other messenger I may not find Till I go forth beyond these prisoning bars, Leaving this memory-haunted world behind, To seek thee, claim thee, wheresoe'er thou be, Since Heaven itself were empty, lacking thee.