Nowadays it would be ‘mint-scented’.
This sinister image, in which fate beguiles with the beauty of an afternoon, is a chill hint of what is to come. On such a day, with destiny so disguised, how could the protagonists (who don’t have much nous between them), see where their actions would lead? How could we, equally climate-duped, see any better than they?
‘An afternoon in which destiny disguises her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant veil, encloses us in warm downy wings, and poisons us with violet-scented breath.’
Source: George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (1859)), p. 175
