patience received as contempt
No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility for insinuating anything aloud.
Context
The wordless channel over-read: Day cannot let Gately's silence be neutral, and decodes the patient nodding as a fully articulated message of condescension and judgment — one delivered, he insists, precisely so that its sender can disown it. It is the mirror image of every scene where meaning fails to transmit; here meaning is manufactured out of a man who is saying nothing at all, the receiver so raw that a still face reads as an insult composed against him.