The other Twinkler, the small active one, did get up early and take herself off, but she frequently mixed up her own articles of toilet with those belonging to the ladies, and would pin up her hair, preparatory to washing her face, with their hairpins.
When they discovered this they hid them, and she, not finding any, having come to the end of her own, lost no time in irresolution but 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."