After Monday's dramatic UDP exit, it was back to normal business in the talks process yesterday: a brief burst of enthusiasm followed by a general air of depression, disillusion and some considerable disbelief.
The enthusiasm, it must be said, came mainly from the army of journalists camped in the relative luxury of the Lancaster House marquee. Those happy colleagues not familiar with the minutiae of the Northern Ireland problem clearly laboured under the not-unreasonable assumption that any British-Irish agreement on the contentious issue of future North-South institutions had to be of some potential value.
Alas, their enthusiasm was to prove short-lived, as one of the principal participants emerged to put paid to any such notion. When he finally took to the podium, Mr David Trimble declared the paper irrelevant: "The mountain has laboured and brought forth a mouse."
Drawing its example from the UUP's recent high-profile leak to a British newspaper, the SDLP had earlier moved ahead of the game, distributing copies of the London-Dublin text on its way to an impromptu press conference at which it hailed the proposals as the natural child of the Joint Framework Documents.
Spinning on Mr Trimble's spin of a fortnight earlier, Mr Hume told us (as the two governments did when they published the earlier Propositions for Heads of Agreement) that the North-South council would be separate from and not subservient to the unionist-friendly council of the isles.
In pointed reference to Sinn Fein, Mr Hume said it should now be clear that the Heads of Agreement paper was fully consistent with the Framework Document, both of which were specifically endorsed yesterday by the two governments. Specifically, he said, the new text gave the SDLP the opportunity in negotiation to seek to build on paragraph 13b of the framework which envisaged:
"North-South institutions . . . with clear identity and purpose, to enable representatives of democratic institutions North and South to enter into new, co-operative and constructive relationships; to promote agreement among the people of Ireland; to carry out on a democratically accountable basis delegated executive, harmonising and consultative functions over a range of designated matters to be agreed; and to serve to acknowledge and reconcile the rights, identities and aspirations of the two major traditions."
Not according to Mr Trimble. Stung by Mr Hume's initiative (which Ulster Unionist spinners suggested was born of the fear that Sinn Fein might be about to walk) the UUP leader joined the post-lunchtime session only to decide, 10 minutes later, that he too had better speak to the media.
The British-Irish paper did not do what he had asked, offered no options and was "of no relevance to what we're doing here". Gearing up to full spin himself, Mr Trimble said he was "astonished" at the SDLP spin. While he had not been party to the negotiation and had not seen the papers, he was able to tell us that paragraph 13b of the Framework Document had been in an early Irish draft and, as we all could see, had been deleted.
The UUP leader then broke into charitable mode. Since the Irish attached such importance to it, he could hardly have expected the British to reject the Framework Documents roundly, but the charitable bit too proved short-lived.
Mr Trimble understood that "some in the SDLP are nostalgic about it and think it can be resurrected" but, he insisted, "it can't. Everybody knows the framework is a failure. There is not going to be an agreement resulting from this process based on the frameworks." Anybody who thought otherwise "is not living in the real world, he's on the wrong planet".
From there things really took off, with Mr Jeffrey Donaldson seeming to upstage Mr Trimble by tearing up his copy of the frameworks - and the leader reclaiming his authority by declaring that if need be, the unionists could always say No: "After all, it would be going back to what we do best."
We were still on planet Earth some hours later when Mr Gerry Adams emerged to give his qualified welcome to the reaffirmation by the governments of their previously declared positions. This provided the basis, he said, on which to build (though building was not what he had in mind in terms of the RUC or the Border).
Asked about Mr Trimble's uncompromising opposition to the frameworks, Mr Adams replied: "I live on this planet and we want to go much further than the Framework Document," but it was difficult, he ventured, to see how a proper foundation for a settlement could be built while the UUP refused to engage with Sinn Fein. The flaw in the UUP position, he asserted, was that the party's engagement was purely "tactical" while Sinn Fein's was "strategic" and geared to an endgame.
Ulster Unionists scoffed at this, but one could see the difficulty. The UUP too has an endgame in mind. It is simply predicated on the assumption that this process cannot deliver for Mr Adams.
Before rushing off to Mr Blair's reception last night, some unionist negotiators conceded that the pendulum had swung back a little, if only because the framework language was once more on the radar, but they were not despondent.
Their belief is that even yesterday they won something by demonstrating (at least to their own satisfaction) that Dublin has to deal directly with them and not rely on the British capacity to deliver them. In that context, perhaps the single most crucial sentence in the new text is that "the final outcome depends on what can be agreed among the participants". But if the Irish Government has got that message, clearly Sinn Fein has not.
The governments emerged at the end of the day plainly determined to force the parties to make the engagement necessary to shape that agreement. Dr Mo Mowlam said they had in effect been negotiating on behalf of the parties and that that was just "daft". The parties themselves, she said, must have ownership of any deal.
Having listed the questions on the how and why of new North-South links, they had given the parties until the week after next to produce their detailed written responses. However, the culture gap seemed as wide as ever when Mr Adams asserted that he wanted to see the agreed positions of the governments on the questions they had presented to the parties.
If the UUP thinks it is driving this process, Sinn Fein clearly sees the unionists as a force still to be driven. Those not driven entirely mad by the day's proceedings divined one glimmer of hope: that in challenging the parties in such detail, London and Dublin might be preparing for the day when they would appeal directly to the people over the heads of the parties.
As for the more desirable alternative - that this was an elaborate dance by parties preparing for a historic compromise - evidence yesterday was decidedly thin on the ground.