be (besalt)

And I thought about then to myself that there were many things wrong with all of us and all our lives and I wondered why my father, who was himself an only son, had not married before he was forty and then I wondered why he had. I even thought that perhaps he had to marry my mother and checked the dates on the flyleaf of the Bible when I learned that my oldest sister had been born a prosaic eleven months after the marriage, and I felt myself then very dirty and based for my lack of faith and for what I thought and done.