He had spoken of business in his letters, as an excuse for moving about so much, but "business" did not always take a man to places of amusement, and Folco seemed to have visited no others.
Men whom Marcello had met had seen Corbario, and what they said about him was by no means indefinite.

He had been amusing himself, and not alone, and the young men had laughed at his attempts to cloak his doings under an appearance of sorrowing respectability.
As all this became clear to Marcello he suffered acutely at times, and he reproached himself bitterly for having been so long blind and indifferent.

It was bad enough that he should have been leading a wild life with Regina in Paris within a few months of his mother's death, but even in the depths of his self-reproach he saw how much worse it was that Folco should have forgotten her so soon.

It was worse than a slight upon his mother's memory, it was an insult.

The good woman who was gone would have shed hot tears if she could have come to life and seen how her son was living; but she would have died again, could she have seen the husband she adored in the places where many had seen him since her death.