Easter Puck: The World, the Flesh, and Two Little Devils

W. E. Hill's cover for the Easter 1913 issue of *Puck* stages a comic morality tableau: a top-hatted, frock-coated gentleman clutches a hymn book between two women costumed as red devils—horned, tailed, and apparently nibbling his ear and cane. The printed caption reads *"The World, the Flesh, and Two Little Devils."* The joke inverts Easter piety, implying that churchgoing respectability is no armor against feminine temptation. The man's wide-eyed alarm is theatrical innocence; the women are the comic aggressors. Hill draws all three figures in a broadly caricatured Broadway-comedy style typical of the era. The humor is squarely in the vein of Edwardian battle-of-the-sexes satire.