nugatory🔊

Even among the most experienced and discriminating of men, she rarely allowed the élite of the high-born or distinguished to escape her temporary allurements, so that she was the absolute horror, alike of the designing, whose baits she rendered nugatory, and the innocent attached ones, whose expectations she blighted, and whose young hearts were lacerated by the perfidy of those whom she misled.

According to these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying […] had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man’s own righteousness.