picked up their nail-scissors and pinned up her pigtails with that.

It was a particularly sacred pair of nail-scissors that almost
everything blunted. To use them for anything but nails was an outrage,
but the grossest outrage was to touch them at all. When they told her
sharply that the scissors were very delicate and she was instantly to
take them out of her hair, she tugged them out in a silence that was
itself impertinent, and pinned up her pigtails with their buttonhook
instead.

Then they raised themselves on their elbows in their berths and asked
her what sort of a bringing up she could have had, and they raised their
voices as well, for though they were grateful, as they later on
declared, for not having been born Junkers, they had nevertheless
acquired by practice in imitation some of the more salient Junker
characteristics.

"You are _salop_," said the upper berth lady,--which is untranslatable,
not on grounds of propriety but of idiom. It is not, however, a term of
praise.

"Yes, that is what you are--_salop_," echoed the lower berth lady. "And
your sister is _salop_ too--lying in bed till all hours."

"It is shameful for girls to be _salop_," said the upper berth.

"I didn't know it was your buttonhook. I thought it was ours," said
Anna-Rose, pulling this out too with vehemence.

"That is because you are _salop_," said the lower berth.

"And I didn't know it wasn't our scissors either."

"_Salop, salop_," said the lower berth, beating her hand on the wooden
edge of her bunk.

"And--and I'm sorry."

Anna-Rose's face was very red. She didn't look sorry, she looked angry.
And so she was; but it was with herself, for having failed in
discernment and grown-upness. She ought to have noticed that the
scissors and buttonhook were not hers. She had pounced on them with the
ill-considered haste of twelve years old. She hadn't been a lady,--she
whose business it was to be an example and mainstay to Anna-Felicitas,
in all things going first, showing her the way.

She picked up the sponge and plunged it into the water, and was just
going to plunge her annoyed and heated face in after it when the upper
berth lady said: "Your mother should be ashamed of herself to have
brought you up so badly."

"And send you off like this before she has taught you even the ABC of
manners," said the lower berth.

"Evidently," said the upper berth, "she can have none herself."

"Evidently," said the lower berth, "she is