FELIPE Gonzalez's infectious grin and Jose Maria Aznar's frigid smile told the whole story. In yesterday's general election, the loser could be happy at his very limited defeat.
Meanwhile, the winner had to conceal his disappointment, not for the first time, at seeing the Spanish electorate deny him the kind of majority promised by the opinion polls.
The mood was close to ecstasy in Mr Aznar's Partido Popular headquarters at eight o'clock. Exit polls showed the kind of high voter turn out that should favour Mr Gonzalez's Socialist's (PSOE) but, unbelievably, the PP were supposed to be within reach of an absolute majority.
"The Spanish people has decided its destiny with high participation," the PP's foreign affairs spokesperson, Mr Jose Maria Robles Fraga, told The Irish Times. "That adds to our satisfaction."
That satisfaction ebbed visibly as the results came in. Ms Esperanza Aguirre, the PP's leading Senate candidate in Madrid, was still buoyant at 10 o'clock, during the "collapse of the PSOE vote in their once impregnable "Red Belt" as proof of the PP's triumph.
By midnight, the PP had 15 less seats than she had confidently predicted. Deflated but professional, she admitted that the PP's position in the new parliament would be as difficult as the PSOE's minority government had been in the old one.
Earlier in the afternoon, I had asked a PP scrutineer at a city centre polling station if the already evident high turnout would be bad for his party. "A high turnout is good for everyone, because it is good for democracy," he replied without hesitation.
The PP, which has been taxed with its Francoist antecedents by the PSOE in recent days, was obviously on its best democratic behaviour, but the text book answer seemed sincere enough.
More significantly, he was chatting amicably to scrutineers from the PSOE, and from the communist led Izquierda Unida. There would be nothing exceptional about such fraternising in most European countries.
But here it underlines the message that the fierce and often lethal rivalry between left and right, which characterised so much Spanish politics this century, is really a thing of the past.
Downstairs, a flock of Poor Clare sisters were gathering, veils and gowns fluttering. Did they see the election in traditional Spanish terms, where the right would protect the interests of the Church, and the left would be anti clerical? "Our statutes forbid us to give interviews," I was told, sweetly but firmly.
The Catholic Church certainly has political loyalties in Spain, particularly in areas like education and social legislation. But the days when anarchists disinterred nuns and danced with their corpses, and priests gave their blessings to fascist firing squads, are long gone.
In the college toilets, there was a sudden reminder of such terrible days. Dozens of political stickers - the only ones visible - called for "death to Eta" (the Basque terrorist organisation) and "White Power" (in English), complete with swastikas and Francoist insignia.
I asked the an Izquierda Unida scrutineer about this curious proliferation of fascist slogans. "Oh," he said dismissively, "a couple of them must have come in to vote first thing, and they put them everywhere, even in the polling booths. They are impossible to remove."
In the early hours of this morning, outside the PP headquarters, the kids on the streets were a far cry from fascist militants.
They were a little disappointed with the result, they said, but they were still going to celebrate, without rancour and without triumphalism. If they represent the mainstream of the PP, Spanish democracy seems in safe hands.