Kitty next replied to a letter from the Admiralty, about sailors' babies (the family arrangements of sailors are, of course, complicated, owing to their having a wife in every port). The Admiralty said that My Lords Commissioners had read the Minister of Brains' (i.e. Kitty's) last letter to them on this subject with much surprise. The Admiralty's faculty of surprise was infinitely fresh; it seemed new, like mercy, each returning day. The Minister of Brains evoked it almost every time he, through the pens of his clerks, wrote to them. My Lords viewed with grave apprehension the line taken by the Minister on this important subject, and They trusted it would be reconsidered. (My Lords always wrote of themselves with a capital They, as if they were deities.) Kitty drafted a reply to this letter and put it aside to consult Prideaux about. She carried on a chronic quarrel with My Lords, doubtless to the satisfaction of both sides. Soothed and stimulated by this encounter, she was the better prepared in temper when she opened a file in which voluminous correspondence concerning two men named Stephen Williams had been jacketed together by a guileless registry, to whom such details as that one Stephen Williams appeared to be a dentist's assistant and the other a young man in the diplomatic service were as contemptible obstacles, to be taken in an easy stride. The correspondence in this file was sufficiently at cross purposes to be more amusing than most correspondence. When she had perused it, Kitty, sad that she must tear asunder this happily linked pair, sent it down to the registry with a regretful note that "These two cases, having no connection, should be registered separately," and fell to speculating, as she often did, on the registry, which, amid the trials that beset them and the sorrows they endured, and the manifold confusions and temptations of their dim life, were so strangely often right. They worked underground, the registry people, like gnomes in a cave, opening letters and registering them and filing them and sending them upstairs, astonishingly often in the file which belonged to them. But, mainly, looking for papers and not finding them, and writing "No trace," "Cannot be traced," on slips, as if the papers were wild animals which had got loose and had to be hunted down. A queer life, questing, burrowing, unsatisfied, underground.... No wonder they made some mistakes.