Oil! by Upton Sinclair

It was cool at the beach in summer, and back at Lobos River it was hot as the original fires; so the family was going to move. Dad wasted very little time on such a matter; he dropped in at a real estate agent's, and asked for the best furnished house in town, and drove out to an imitation palace on the oceanfront, and looked it over, and went back to the office and signed a six month's lease for twenty-five hundred dollars.

Outside, this house was plaster applied to chicken-wire, or something that looked like it; inside, it was shiny like the home of Mrs. Groarty, only it was imitation mahogany instead of imitation oak. There was a big entrance hall, and a drawing-room on one side, and on the other a dining-room, with elaborate up-to-date built-in features. To these the owner had added furniture regardless of expense or period: spindley-legged gilded French things, done in flowered silk; mid-century American black walnut, with roses and rosettes; black Chinese teakwood, carved with dragons. There were statues of nude ladies, in highly polished marble, and also a marble clergyman in a frock coat and a string tie. Upstairs were six bedrooms, each done in a different color by a lady from the best department-store in town. Some people might have found the place lacking in the elements of home, but Bunny never thought of such a thing -- he had learned to be happy in a hotel room, with the use of the lobby. All his life that he could remember, home had been a place which you rented, or bought with the idea of holding it as a real estate speculation. As the Indians in the Hudson Bay country kill a moose in the wintertime, and move to the moose, so Dad started an oil well, and moved to the well.