Read "Oil!" by Upton Sinclair online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
There came another development, to protect Vee from the possibility of boredom. Schmolsky sent her up the "continuity" of the new picture upon which she was to start work in the fall. And then suddenly it was revealed that the world's darling knew how to read! For a whole hour she sat buried in it, and then she leaped up, ready to start rehearsing -- and all the hurricanes that ever swept the province of Ontario were as nothing to the one that came now. Clear the way for The Princess of Patchouli!
It was a popular musical comedy which was to be made into a moving picture. "Patchouli" was one of the little Balkan kingdoms, though it looked and acted very much like Vienna of the Strauss waltzes. A young American engineer came in to build a railroad, and found himself mistaken for a conspirator, and presently he was rescuing the lovely princess from a revolutionary band -- no Bolsheviks, these were aristocratic array conspirators, so Bunny wouldn't have his feelings hurt, would he? Of course the hero carried her off, married her for love only, and then got the kingdom thrown in -- the bankers who were financing the railroad bought it for him.