Klimt's The Kiss on upper back

Anton beat gold leaf in the back of the Hollow Lane arcade, so thin you could read a newspaper through it, and Maren sewed gloves at the stall opposite, so close their elbows knocked when the crowds came in. Her mother kept her on a short rope. Nobody spoke across that gap. So Anton wrapped each square of gold in tissue and tucked it into the lining of a glove, and Maren stitched her answers in blue thread along the cuffs, little squares and spirals, and that was how they courted, one cuff at a time.

In October the gutters flooded, and the mother found a glove with a gold square caught in the seam. She tore it open in front of everyone and shouted that a boy with gold on his hands would never marry a glover's daughter. Maren said nothing. She took off her apron, walked out into the downpour, and stood in the middle of the cobbles where the water ran deepest. Anton came out after her without his coat, and the whole market watched them stand there, foreheads together, the rain running in silver lines down the lane.

Gold leaf is light; it does not sink. It lifted off the stones in a hundred small squares and drifted down the drains in curling spirals, and by morning the grates were full of it. The mother went down with a bucket and came back with her hands empty. She never sent the girl back to the stall. She kept the torn glove, though, and it is the one in the glass case behind me, if you care to look.