Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Even amid such agonies and thrills, Bunny, being young, had his personal life. On his way home after drill he ran into Nina Goodrich, one of his classmates, turning a corner in her car, clad in a bathing suit with a cape over it. Upon such little things do one's life-destinies depend! She slowed up and called, "Come have a swim with me! " He hopped in, and she whisked him down to the beach in two minutes, and in five more he had hired a bathing suit and got into it, and the two of them were running a race along the sand.

Nina Goodrich was one of those lavish Junos, of whom California brings to ripeness many thousands every year. Her limbs were strong trunks, and her hips were built for carrying a dozen babies, and her bosom for the nourishing of them. She had fair hair and a complexion that had not come out of a bottle, and her skin was bronzed by hours in the surf, in those fragile one-piece bathing suits the girls were wearing, which revealed considerably more than fifty percent of their natural charms. Never could a man who took himself a wife in Southern California complain that he did not know what he was getting!