In legal affairs, as in politics, sometimes delivery is everything.
So when Dyson Heydon, QC, made his way into the hearing room on Monday afternoon to punt into the park any idea that he should step down as royal commissioner, the only surprise was the atmospherics he injected into his announcement.
By atmospherics we mean degrees of permafrost. Heydon is the Mr Freeze of Australian law. Call him aloof, or cool. Sometimes a little on the chilly side. 
The sceptics felt that he had already peaked, that his tone could not be any colder than his personal arctic best 10 days before, in hearing the arguments by union barristers to recuse himself, when the temperature in the hearing room approached absolute zero Kelvin.
But on Monday, in uttering the words, "the applications must be dismissed", Heydon established himself as a man who can always take a few extra degrees of temperature out of the room. The decision not to step down was hardly a surprise. For a brilliant retired jurist whose career nevertheless had left few marks, whose words had forked no lightning, the inquiry into trade unions offered a chance to reform his legacy, to make the Heydon Commission a part of Australian history.
The proposition that union counsel put to the Commissioner was simple: that Heydon should acknowledge that he had endangered all of this by an act of pure silliness, in accepting a speaking invitation, which he then compounded by the cavalier and careless way in which he repeatedly responded to disclosure requests. They invited Heydon to step down as commissioner, leaving his legacy forever defined by serial silliness.
His answer, to quote a Julia Roberts line, was: "Tempting, but no."
Legal niceties aside, a fair-minded observer might think that Heydon was never going to go gentle into that long good night. Not that he had anything against any fair-minded observer proposed by counsel, even if they turned out to be "a reckless, irrational, perhaps even malevolent-minded person", as he suggested.
Cool as a cucumber, then.
"Now fair mindedness, like peace, is indivisible," Heydon intoned, by which he seemed to mean that if he could show that his accusers were not fair in one part of their accusations then he could discredit all that they said.
The suggestion that he would automatically read emails was "fanciful", he found.
The fair-minded observer would reason "that one thing a legal background brings is a capacity to go to the point of an email".
Thus a lawyer is more likely to realise he doesn't have to read an email, as any fair-minded observer will tell you, is Heydon's argument - though to anyone who has received a legal billing statement, this may be a little hard to credit.
Dyson Heydon is a strange animal, a Latin scholar and former judge who attributed his many dissent opinions in part to concerns over the inferior grammar displayed by his fellow jurists.
With that kind of DNA one can only imagine his eventual retirement plans - perhaps to head the Human Gerund Project, a bold attempt to map the genetic code of all verbs which should never be used as nouns.
In that respect, his published reasons proved a little disappointing. Aficionados might regret the limited use of the declarative subjunctive and the complete absence of handy Latin phrases.
Niccolo Machiavelli was not known for his legal insights but he knew all about atmospherics. When you have good news, draw it out, he said, but if you have bad news, get it over with as quickly as possible.
For Heydon, there has been no getting over it. It may still taint his legacy.
Sic transit gloria?