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, without the ethnic or racial grotesquerie that appeared elsewhere in Puck's history. The humor is squarely in the vein of Edwardian battle-of-the-sexes satire.