Up Your Banners (1969) – Macmillan

_____Miss Fry came bubbling in then, frantic and atwitter. She has been my father’s secretary for fourteen years, and my father’s predecessor’s secretary for ten or fifteen years before that. A stout but rigidly corseted woman of indeterminate but advanced age, she hennaed her hair and wore too much bright-red lipstick on her mouth. She was blind as a bat, but her harlequin glasses were almost invariably dangling on her bosom, suspended from a silver chain around her neck.
_____Except now. As though to emphasize the rare and unusual nature of the current situation, Miss Fry was actually wearing her glasses on her face, blinking rapidly through the lenses and walking very quickly on tiptoe. She always walked on tiptoe, but not always this fast.
_____“They have signs!” she cried. “They’re picketing!”
_____“So it’s come to this,” my father said darkly, and placed his palms on the desk as though to keep it from sliding away in a typhoon.
_____I said, “What the heck is going on? Will somebody please tell–”
_____Miss Fry had hurried to the window and now she looked back at us and said, “What does nepotism mean?”
_____“Favoritism arising out of a family relationship,” said my father.
_____I said, “Why?”
_____“Because that’s what it says on the signs,” she said.