"At last, she reached the age of fifteen.

‘There, now we’ve got you off our hands,’ her grandmother, the old queen mother, said. ‘Come here, let me dress you out like your other sisters!’ and she placed a garland of white lilies in her hair, but each petal in the flower was half a pearl; and the old lady had eight large oysters attach themselves to the princess’s tail to indicate her high rank.
‘It hurts so much,’ the little mermaid said.
‘Yes, one has to go through a great deal of trouble to look beautiful!’ the old woman said.
Oh! she would so much have liked to shake all this finery off her and lay the heavy garland aside; her red flowers in the garden suited her much better, but she didn’t dare rearrange things."