In this last novel, written a couple years after Faulkner finished the Snopes trilogy, the family is much diminished. Mink, who is so vivid in The Mansion, is simply the "mad kinsman" who murdered Flem "ten or twelve years ago" (25). And in the novel's one mention of him, Flem himself figures mainly as an element in the history of a Jefferson hotel.
These "two ladies" appear in one of the stories young Bayard brings back from the War. Apparently these women were the occasion for a fight in a bar between Bayard and an "Australian major" (124). "Ladies" is certainly being used ironically, but whether the women are simply lower class, or working prostitutes, cannot be established from the text or the context.
