"For what is so lovely here in the ocean – your fish’s tail – they find ugly up there on the earth

they don’t understand it at all, there they have two clumsy props that they call legs in order to be considered beautiful or handsome!’
Then the little mermaid sighed and looked sadly at her fish’s tail. ‘Let’s be content,’ the old woman said, ‘let’s jump and leap in the three hundred years we have to live in, that’s quite a long time after all. This evening there is to be court ball!’
The little mermaid sang the most beautifully of them all, and they applauded her, and for a moment she felt happy in her heart, for she knew that she had the loveliest voice of anyone on earth and in the sea!
But soon she began to think once more of the world above her; she couldn’t forget the handsome prince and her sorrow at not owning – as he did – an immortal soul. So she slipped away from her father’s palace, and while everything was singing and enjoyment inside, she sat out in her own little garden and was sad.