This is going to sound stupid, but how does one eject from a set? Yesterday night, I opened a set and a couple of things occurred to me after we started talking.

One, none of the girls in the set were quite as attractive as they had seemed from across the room. I hadn't been drinking, so it wasn't beer goggles. Maybe I need to get my prescription checked.

Two, the most attractive girl in the set was belligerent and pushy. I opened properly by talking to her friends. The opening was pretty clumsy but it seemed to do the trick. In short order, though, she had raised her voice and taken control of the conversation.

Three, I made a HUGE mistake and DLV'd in a way that made this girl angry. She decided I was full of crap and she was going to break me. She called me on it and I tried to brush it off because I knew it was a bad conversation but she had latched on and the longer I stood there grinning, trying to offer nonchalant answers, the louder and more in-my-face she got.

By the time I realized I NEEDED to get out of that conversation, the only think I could think of was to shake my head and tell her, "You're done" and walk away. Granted, with proper calibration, I should have avoided the situation altogether, but at what point should I have realized that it was time to eject from the set and how could I have departed gracefully without just halting the conversation and leaving?

I appreciate, of course, that my REAL goal should be learning to 'fly safely,' as it were, but I want to know how to bail in an emergency, especially until I get more practice. In this case, I recognize that I should have used a false time constraint, I should have used a better opener or I should have calibrated this one differently, I should have been more assertive over the frame and not let her take over, I shouldn't have made the DLV statement that set her off. There are lots of things that I should have done differently. Given all of those things, though, how do I escape and still save a little bit of my dignity?

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Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea