Yet people thought they knew, even here and now. Nicky's friend, Mr. West; he, presumably, thought he knew; anyhow, if not going so far as that, he had taken a hypothesis and was, so to speak, acting, thinking, and talking on it. He was clever, too. Mrs. Frampton and Kate thought they knew, too; but they weren't clever. They believed in God: but Alix could have no use for the Violette God. Mrs. Frampton's God was the Almighty, an omnipotent Being who governed all things in gross and in detail, including the weather (though the connection here was mysteriously vague). A God of crops and sun and rain, who spoke in the thunder; a truly pagan God (though Mrs. Frampton would not have cared for the word), of chastisements and arbitrary mercies, who was capable of wrecking ships and causing wars, in order to punish and improve people. The God of the 'act of God' in the shipping regulations. A God who could, and would, unless for wise purposes he chose otherwise, keep men and women physically safe, protect them from battle, murder, and sudden death. An anthropomorphic God, in the semblance, for some strange reason known only to the human race, of a man. A God who somehow was responsible for the war. A God who ordered men's estates so that there should be a wholesome economic inequality among them. Such was Mrs. Frampton's God, in no material way altered from the conception of the primitive Jews or the modern South Sea Islanders, who make God in their image. He had no attractions for Alix, who could not feel that a God of weather was in any way concerned with the soul of the world. Kate's God, on the other hand, was for Alix enshrined in the little books of devotion that Kate had lent her sometimes, and all of which she found revolting, even on the hypothesis that you believed that sort of thing. They propounded ingenuous personal questions for the reader to ask himself, such as 'Have I eaten or drunk too much? Have I used bad words? Have I read bad books?' (As if, thought Alix, any one would read a bad book on purpose, life being so much too short to get through the good ones; unless one had the misfortune to be a reviewer, like Nicky, or to have bad taste, like many others; and then wasn't it rather a misfortune than a fault?) 'Have I been unkind to animals?' the inquiries went on. 'Have I obeyed those set over me? Have I kept a guard of my eyes?' (a mysterious phrase, unexplained by any footnote, and leaving it an open question whether to have done so or to have omitted to do so would have been the sin. Alix inclined to the former view; it somehow sounded an unpleasant thing to do.) These books adopted a tone too intimate and ejaculatory for Alix's taste; and they were, it must be admitted, about all she knew of Kate's God, and her distaste for Him merely meant that she disliked some of Kate's methods of approach.